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.

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 481, About two bits of text on the page, (a) "initiated a program around 1975", and (b) "In all likelihood this was at least in part because of ongoing disputes between BBN and ARPA over release and ownership of some of the work products of earlier projects.", Steve Crocker who is being discussed on this page says (a) "the correct year is 1974", and says the following about b: "I absolutely did not exclude BBN from the program because of the prior dispute. That was behind us. I had very high opinions of the technical people at BBN in both divisions. The dispute had been with the legal/business people, and I would not have hesitated to fund additional work at BBN. I did, however, very much like Warshall's ideas. I also spent money getting Gunter AFS in Montgomery, AL on the net and providing Engelbart's NLS service to the AF. Bill Carlson came in as I left and took over the program. I heard he made substantial changes but I didn't pay attention to the details."
• 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.
• Some J.C.R. Licklider stories (collected in the preparation of the Annals special issues and the subsequent book).
  John Senders on Lick, a .txt file of an email from Senders to Ray Nickerson. John Senders was at BBN in the early days of BBN's computing and psychology activities. You can search the BBN computing history book at the above URL for "Senders" to learn more about his involvement at BBN. More about his life beyond BBN is at www.johnwsenders.net/14.html.
  Notes on Lick from other BBN people

  Relevant to Chapter 1 (Founding a Culture of Engineering Creativity)

• Leo Beranek: Technology, Business, and Civic Visionary, an article written for the Fall 2014 issue of Acoustics Today which was a commemorative issue in honor of Leo Beranek's 100th birthday in Septemer 2014, with other articles and features about Leo's life

  Relevant to Chapter 3 (The ABC's of BBN)

• In Memoriam, John Swets (1928-2016)

  Relevant to Chapter 4 (Early Years of Basic Computer and Software Engineering)

• Telcomp implementation plan
  BBN-MGH Hospital Project and the PDP-1d Exec III system on which the project was developed
• BBN Strcomp and ISRcomp User Manual
• BBN Information Storage and Retrieval System User Manual
• Hospital Project Memo 6A Hardware Status Report
• Hospital Project Memo 6B Executive Software Status Report
• Programming Summary by Barbara Lieb
• Exec III System Manual
• Programming Software Status Report; manuals for the Midas assembler, Editor, DDT, and Handle tools used for project programming
• Handwritten notes relating to Midas linking loader
• Program listing for the Midas linking loader
• TRAC IV for Hospital machine, 1-1-1965
• Report on the PDP-1d Exec III time-sharing executive
• Exec III 1966 program listings
• Exec III 1973 program listings
• List of project materials sent to the Computer History Museum

  Relevant to Chapter 5 (The Way We Were: Aspects of the Culture of BBN)

• 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 12 (Medical Applications of Computers)

• Technical evaluation of the plans of the National Data Communications Inc. for the "Reach" system
• Recommendations for an improved data processing facility for Bio-Science Laboratories
• Specification of an improved data processing system for Bio-Science Laboratories

  Relevant to Chapter 17 (Networking at BBN)

• Chapter 17 is titled "Data Networking @ BBN"; following are more documents on this topic plus links to the IMP system listing from 1973
• About the 1994 25th ARPANET anniversary celebration
  Video of "The History of the Future — ARPANET, Internet, and Beyond — a celebration of 25 years of innovation in network communications" (organized by Bolt Beranek and Newman); Copley Plaza Hotel, Boston, Massachusetts, September 10, 1994; the video at another location
  Steve Levy, long time BBN CEO until he brought in George Conrades as CEO a while before the 1994 anniversary event, had a copy of the original video tape containing both videos above. Steve graciously had the tape digitized so it could be circulated to interested parties in 2019, this 50th anniversary year.
  – Doug Englebart was in Boston for the above celebration and was invited to give a lecture at BBN.
  – Some additional artifacts from the 1994 celebration.
• 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
• 1972 QTR 13 (not in the list at the immediately above link)
• About the design decisions
• Completion report, 1978, 208 pages
• Draft completion report, 1977, 942 pages
• About helping with another institution's network design in the early 1970s
• Resurrection of 1973 IMP system software
• Through BBN's involvement with data networking, a succession of BBNers were the editor of the ACM SIGCOMM's Computer Communication Review. One of these editors, Craig Partridge, recently wrote an article for the CCR relating to this evolution of editors of the CCR.
• See also my list of documents on the Telnet protocol
• Internet Design Notes: read the first page at the link to see what this project was about; it was partly about designing internet protocols and partly about designing a Butterfly Computer based gateway.
• PDP-10 (TENEX?) listing for "imptst" program (I guess for testing the connection between the host and the IMP); it is labeled:
  TITLE IMPTST
  SUBTTL R.S,TOMLINSON 14 SEP 72
• 1971-1973 documents about the IMP group using the PDP-1d and later TENEX for development and network monitoring.
• A video of a presentation done by Dave Walden on the BBN ARPANET project at the Vintage Computer Festival East in May 2018. The video stops before the presentation was done. Here are the slides for the entire presentation

  Relevant to Chapter 18 (Distributed Computing at BBN)

• An Operational System for Computer Resource Sharing
• See the correction about about page 418.

  Relevant to Chapter 19 (Networked Email)

• Chapter 19 is nominally about email developments at BBN.
  Articles elsewhere discuss the broader history of the development of email.

  Relevant to Chapter 20 (SIMNET: A Revolution in Distributed Team Training)

• SIMNET and Beyond: A History of the Development of Distributed Simulation by Duncan Miller

  Relevant to Chapter 21 (Later Years of Basic Computer and Software Engineering)

• Bibliography of documents on parallel processing work at BBN
• Another biography of documents on parallel processing work at BBN
• Tentative agenda for a presentation on Monarch etc.
• US patent that is related to Monarch
• 1989-12-28 Monarch and Monarch related project results
• Thoth project presentation to BBN management 1987-12-15
• programmability of Monarch
• Monarch presentation
• 1989-01 Monarch parallel processor design
• Where Monarch materials were put into storage by BBN (in case some historian even wants to start searching for them
• Internet Design Notes: read the first page at the link to see what this project was about; it was partly about designing internet protocols and partly about designing a Butterfly Computer based gateway.
• TENEX system design notes from early 1969

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.