Website for the book A Culture of Innovation: Insider Accounts of Computing and Life at BBN

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This is a web site for the above-named book edited by David Walden and Raymond Nickerson and with chapters contributed by 19 long-time BBN people.

A Culture of Innovation is a collection of chapters relevant to many of the areas of BBN computing work over the decades of its history with most chapters written by one or more participants in the described activity (or a close observer). We believe the book will provide an interesting picture of the company to people who have had involvement with BBN or are interested in computing history. It also will be a useful reference work for historians of computing. (Note, this book is not history by a professional historian—no interpretation, no historiography. It is also not a history book where one author tells an overall story, like Waldrop's The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.)

The second "printing" of the book is available online. It is available for download for individual reading. All other rights are reserved.

Physical copies of the first printing of the book are available in retail bookstores, e.g.,

• Amazon.com -- see the reviews there
• Harvard.com -- a slightly compressed edition in terms of trim size for printing on the Harvard Book Store's print-on-demand machine, Paige M. Gutenberg
• From me directly (dave@walden-family.com) if you want to place a bulk order for the book.
• from me directly if you want to do a bulk order for the book

To contact us

Front matter from the book

• Title pages, dedication, table of contents, and preface

On-line color images that do not reproduce well in the B&W interior of the book

• Figure 8.6 of Chapter 8 by Nickerson and Fidel.
• Figure 11.1, figure 11.2, figure 11.6, figure 11.7 and figure 11.8, and the Morris figure on page 246 of Chapter 11 by Fortmann.
• Because of its many color figures, all of Chapter 13 by Feurzeig [this is not the chapter's final version].

Other books with lots of BBN history

• Leo Beranek memoir
• John Swets memoir
• Sound Ideas, a book by Eric Wood and Deborah Melone on the acoustic consulting activities of BBN, Acentech, and other spin-off organizations. [Eric says he has a few copies still available. Ask me about how Eric says one can obtain a copy of the book. -Dave]
  In addition to the book, see the photos by Leo Beranek and listen to the accompanying audio recording by Leo with links from "Early Days at BBN" at the bottom of the Acentech web page. The direct links are: photos and audio.

Corrections to the first printing
[The second "printing" will be on-line only and will include the following corrections.]

• page xviii, Ray Nickerson entry: change "25 year" to "25 years"
• page xix, first line: change "this chapter" to "Chapter 8"
• page 13, Figure 1.7 caption: change "and guest" to "with David Green"
• page 222, third to last line: change "(paper tape)" to "(small magnetic tape)"
• page 225, Figure 10.5 caption: change "paper" to "magnetic"
• page 416, third bullet: change "emal" to "email"
• page 419, 4th and 5th lines of block quote from Cosell: delete "[Model 35 Teletype—15 characters/second]"
• page 495, last line of paragraph 3 of 19.3: change "email" to "e-mail"
• page 496, line 3 under Hermes: change "RDMAIL" to "READMAIL"
• page 497, line 2 of Intelpost paragraph 3: change "1974" to "1979"
• page 498, line 6 of paragraph 2: change "pro-processor" to "preprocessor"S
• page 498, note 6: change "anther" to "another"
• page 498, note 6: replace "BCLP" with "BCPL"
• page 546, note 3: replace "Garbiel’s" with "Gabriel's"

Supplementary content

• BBN and Computers—A History by Phil Bertoni and Paul Castleman, a preprint of an article for the Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology.
  [I scanned this a number of years ago before I learned much about how to size scanned pages and adjust photo brightness for posting on the web. -DCW]
• BBN computer technology timeline up to 2000.
  [I believe Ray Nickerson drafted this in 2003. If someone wants to work on reviewing it for accuracy and updating it, please let me know. -DCW]
• BBN Organization and Management (1957-2003), compiled in 2003.
  [I could use help to improve the accuracy and scope of this document. -DCW]
  A relevant web page pointed out by John Curran.
  Relevant to Chapter 5
• Photo of attendees at the 1991 Science Development Program dinner.
• A History of the BBN Piano, by Beverly Schwartz, August 2001.
• Extra curricular activities in BBN Division 6, circa 1971-1978
  Relevant to Chapter 17
• Chapter 17 is titled "Data Networking @ BBN"; following are more documents on this topic plus links to the IMP system listing from 1973
• 1994 Bibliography of BBN ARPANET and Internet publications
• About the mischaracterization by academic mathematicians of the original ARPANET routing algorithm
  About the ARPANET IMP development
• Request for Quotation (RFQ) from ARPA
• BBN's proposal in response to the RFQ
• First published paper on the system
• Many of the quarterly technical reports
• About the design decisions
• Completion report
• About helping with another institution's network design in the early 1970s
• We have the IMP system listing for the BBN-modified Honeywell 516/316 from 1973. It consists of four parts (in the order they have been bound in a binder since 1973): one page of patches for the then running system; six pages of memory allocation definitions for the system; a 274 page listing of the system; and a approximately 50 page concordance of the names and labels used in the system. The listing program used involved some automated tools for preventing interrupt bugs.
• See also my list of document on the Telnet protocol
  Relevant to Chapter 19
• Chapter 19 is nominally about email developments at BBN.
  Articles elsewhere discuss the broader history of the development of email.
  Relevant to Chapter 21
• Bibliography of documents on parallel processing work at BBN

Other BBN links, etc.

• website for BBN as it exists today.
• website relating to the mailing list for ex-BBN employees (the alumni mailing list).
• If you have worked at BBN at some point, you can join the above mentioned mailing list: subscribe.

Provenance of the book

Six papers based on this work appeared in a BBN special issue of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, volume 27, number 2, April-June 2005. These papers were by Leo Beranek, John Swets, Stephen Levy, Frank Heart, Sheldon Baron, and Richard Estrada and Edward Starr. Six more papers appeared in a second special issue of the same journal (January-March 2006, volume 28, number 1), papers by Paul Castleman, Wallace Feurzeig, Johh Makhoul, Ralph Weischedel, Richard Schantz, and Craig Partridge and Steven Blumenthal. However, much of the initially submitted content of these papers could not be published because of the journal's page limitations.

More papers went through the Annals peer review process and were judged acceptable for publication but had to be withdrawn because of page limitations: a paper by Raymond Nickerson and Sanford Fidell, and several papers by David Walden. We also had still more material that has never been submitted for publication.

Thus we produced this book, A Culture of Innovation: Insider Accounts of Computing and Life at BBN, that contains longer versions of most of the papers published in the Annals, the papers that were withdrawn, and other content.