Where Wizards Stay Up Late

by Matthew Lyon

  When the United Nations asked Bolt to design the acoustics for its new complex of buildings in an old slaughterhouse district on Manhattan’s East River, Bolt called Beranek into his office and showed him the pile of papers spelling out the UN job. It was too much for one person to take on. At the time, Beranek was busy on a project to improve the acoustics in a chain of Brooklyn movie theaters. But Bolt convinced Beranek to join him in starting a consulting firm to take on the UN project. A year later they took in Robert Newman, an architect with a physics background who had been a student of Bolt’s, and Bolt Beranek and Newman was born.

  In its earliest days, BBN was truly a consulting company. That is, Bolt and Beranek hired people, provided them with office space—and expected them to find the work. And find work they did. The UN project was such a conspicuous success that the company didn’t need to advertise for the first ten years of its existence. The business grew as BBN consulted on the design of acoustical systems for office buildings, apartment complexes, and performing arts centers. When a large wind tunnel was built for testing jet engines near Cleveland, the noise disturbed people within a ten-mile radius, and local residents threatened to have the facility shut down. BBN engineers figured out a way to muffle the sound. The company was developing expertise in analyzing audio tapes: It was called in after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and would be called on again after the shootings at Kent State University in 1970. Its most famous tape analysis would come during the Watergate scandal in 1974, when BBN would be involved in the analysis of the infamous 18.5-minute gap in the Nixon tapes. A committee headed by Dick Bolt would conclude that the erasure was deliberate.

  In 1957 Beranek had recruited Licklider to BBN. He had worked with Lick at Harvard during the war, and when he went to MIT, he convinced Lick to go there too. When Beranek hired Lick at BBN, it wasn’t so much Lick’s background in psychoacoustics but his interest in human-machine interaction that Beranek thought was interesting. Beranek sensed that consulting jobs would pick up in the business of helping companies build machines that were more efficient amplifiers of human labor, which meant bringing about some kind of compatibility between humans and machines. “I didn’t know how big a business it was,” Beranek later recalled. “But I thought it was a good supplement to what we were doing.”

  Lick, of course, had thought it through more fully. He believed the future of scientific research was going to be linked to high-speed computers, and he thought computing was a good field for BBN to enter. He had been at BBN for less than a year when he told Beranek he’d like to buy a computer. By way of persuasion, Lick stressed that the computer he had in mind was a very modern machine—its programs and data were punched on paper tape rather than the conventional stacks of IBM cards.

  “What will it cost?” Beranek asked him.

  “Around $25,000.”

  “That’s a lot of money,” Beranek replied. “What are you going to do with it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Licklider was convinced the company would be able to get contracts from the government to do basic research using computers. The $25,000, he assured Beranek, wouldn’t be wasted.

  None of the company’s three principals knew much about computers. Beranek knew that Lick, by contrast, was almost evangelistic in his belief that computers would change not only the way people thought about problems but the way problems were solved. Beranek’s faith in Licklider won the day. “I decided it was worth the risk to spend $25,000 on an unknown machine for an unknown purpose,” Beranek said. The computer he purchased for Lick was an LGP-30, manufactured in 1958 by Royal-McBee, a subsidiary of the Royal Typewriter Company. It had a drum memory and was slow even by the standards of its day. Yet Lick went straight to work tinkering with it, using it for lengthy statistical calculations and psychoacoustics experiments.

  Not long after the computer arrived, Ken Olsen stopped by to see the Royal-McBee machine and to tell BBN about the computer he was building at his new company, Digital Equipment. Olsen wanted to lend Beranek a prototype of the machine, which he called the PDP-1, so BBN engineers could take a look at it. Beranek agreed. But the computer measured four feet by eight feet, and there were few doorways at BBN through which to squeeze it. So it was set up in the lobby. A month or so later, after everyone had a chance to play with it, BBN sent it back to Olsen with recommendations for fine-tuning. When the PDP-1 went on the market for slightly less than $150,000, BBN bought the first one.

  The presence of the PDP-1 and the work Licklider was doing with it attracted a number of leading computer scientists to BBN. The firm had also become well known as a place whose hiring philosophy was to recruit MIT dropouts. The idea was that if they could get into MIT they were smart, and if they dropped out, you could get them cheaper. Beranek gave Lick a great deal of freedom to hire whomever he pleased, and Licklider did just that, occasionally forgetting to tell Beranek. “I was wandering around the building one day to see what was going on in the computer side, and I saw two strange guys sitting in one of the large rooms there,” Beranek said. (Lick would have been happy to wear a suit to a picnic, but his hirees were decidedly less formal.) Beranek had no idea who the two men were. “I walked up to the first fellow and said, ‘Who are you?’ and he said, ‘Who are you?’” The two young men, it turned out, were friends of Licklider’s from MIT—Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy, two of the most prominent figures in the emerging field of artificial intelligence.

  The PDP-1 had computing power roughly equivalent to today’s pocket organizers and a little less memory. People at BBN kept the computer going day and night doing interactive programming. They even built a time-sharing system around it, dividing the screen for four simultaneous users. The time-sharing demonstration was a success, and BBN decided to start a time-sharing service in the Boston area by placing terminals throughout the city. Soon, however, General Electric mounted a similar effort and quickly stole the bulk of BBN’s time-sharing business.

  The presence of an accessible computer inspired a change in the company. Everyone began thinking up things that could be done with it. One BBN scientist, Jordan Baruch, decided hospitals could use computers to keep more accurate information on patients, so he set out to computerize the record handling at Massachusetts General Hospital. Lick and others began exploring ways in which computers could transform libraries. But computers in the early 1960s were still too underpowered to do much.

  By this time, BBN had begun to concentrate seriously on computer technology. The richly academic atmosphere at BBN earned the consulting firm a reputation as “the third university” in Cambridge. “I had the policy that every person we hired had to be better than the previous people,” said Beranek. Next to MIT and Harvard, BBN became one of the most attractive places to work in the Boston area. Some people even considered it better than the universities because there was no teaching obligation and no worry over earning tenure. It was a rarefied environment—the cognac of the research business.

  The firm’s architectural-acoustics division went through a crisis in the early 1960s, when Beranek was hired to design the acoustics for the new Philharmonic Hall (later renamed Avery Fisher Hall) at New York’s Lincoln Center. Both Beranek and the chief architect were criticized for overlooking certain acoustical principles important in designing concert halls. After many attempts at minor adjustment, it became clear that the situation was hopeless. The problem had to be solved by brute force: The walls and balconies were torn out, along with the ceiling—ten thousand tons of building material in all—and carted to dumps. The repair took several years and millions of dollars to carry out, under the supervision of a new consultant. In its exhaustive coverage of the problems, the New York Times focused its attention on Leo Beranek.

  If BBN hadn’t already diversified into computer research, the Lincoln Center debacle could have spelled its end. By the mid-1960s, however, the company’s offices had expanded into a row of low, fairly nondescript buildings, mostly old wa
rehouses that stood along a quiet side street near Fresh Pond on Cambridge’s western edge. The offices had a casual architectural uniformity best described as low-rent modernism—Mondrian without the colors. These were stripped-down, spare, boxlike buildings whose flat roofs, few windows, and thin walls exuded simplicity and economy in design. Four of the buildings had been built for other purposes, mainly as warehouse space, before BBN bought and converted them into offices, shops, and laboratories. Building Number 2 was designed by Bolt himself and had a couple of unusual features: Its foundation “floated” in the Cambridge mud, effectively isolating the entire structure from external vibrations; and it was designed for the kind of people BBN was hiring—academicians—whom Bolt expected to fill their offices with books. Therefore he designed the new building to withstand an unusual amount of weight. There were corridors and enclosed footbridges between all of the BBN buildings, making it possible to follow a kind of meandering path through the complete row without going outside during the winter. For a while, BBN depended on borrowed steam piped in from an adjacent laundry to heat some of the quarters.

  Among the computer researchers were Wally Feurzeig and Seymour Papert, who were working on educational applications. Papert was a consultant to BBN for about four years in the late 1960s. While there, he conceived of and made the first rough design of a programming language that would be accessible to school-age children. The idea was adopted as a research theme by BBN’s education group, which Feurzeig ran, and the language came to be called LOGO.

  While the acousticians usually came to work in jackets and ties, the atmosphere on the computer side was decidedly more relaxed. “When we got into the computer business we had the strangest people working for us,” said Beranek. He appreciated the brilliance of the people Lick hired but seldom felt comfortable around them. He recalled being invited to a New Year’s Eve party at the home of a computer engineer around 1965. “It was like going to the Addams Family house,” Beranek said. “They were all in bare feet. The women were wearing tight-fitting clothing. I showed up with a tie on and had to take it off.”

  Frank Heart was a notable exception. Conservative in his attire and prone to caution in general, Heart was at that time a computer systems engineer at MIT’s Lincoln Lab. In 1966 BBN embarked on a campaign to hire him for its hospital computer project. Heart was an engineer with a reputation for making things happen. Tell him you wanted something built and, by god, you would have it. But Heart was also hardheaded and not easy to pry away from Lincoln.

  A self-described “overprotected Jewish kid from Yonkers,” Heart was bookish and, in high school, a bit of a nerd. Frank wanted desperately to attend MIT, which posed a problem for his parents, who were of modest means. (Through the Depression, Heart’s father managed to keep his job as an engineer for Otis Elevator.) The thought of sending her only son to a school so far away was particularly difficult for Frank’s mother, who did most of the overprotecting. MIT admitted him in 1947, but with a scholarship so small as to guarantee continued financial struggles for his parents.

  Following the example set by his father, who built elevator control systems, Frank had decided to become an electrical engineer before entering MIT. To ease the financial strain on his family, he enrolled in a five-year master’s degree program, in which work and school were combined in alternate semesters. He worked one summer at a General Electric factory testing large power transformers. “That was something you want to do just once,” Heart recalled. In his second year, he chose to specialize in power engineering—the design of large-scale electrical systems, such as power plants, building transformers, generators, and motors.

  Then he discovered computers. In 1951, Heart’s senior year, MIT offered its first course ever in computer programming, taught by a visiting professor named Gordon Welchman. Heart signed up. “It was an unbelievable revelation to me that a thing like a computer could exist,” Heart said. He dropped out of the work-study program, a decision that shocked many people because it was such a difficult program to get into. “I got all sorts of nasty letters from MIT and G.E.” But he had caught the computer bug and never looked back.

  Thanks to Welchman’s introduction, Heart became so interested in computers that he earned his bachelor’s degree one term early and finished his master’s degree while working as a research assistant on the Whirlwind Project. Whirlwind controlled a radar defense system for tracking aircraft. A radar (RAdio Detection And Ranging) system measures electromagnetic pulses reflected from an object to provide information concerning its direction and distance. Jamming devices can destroy data from a single radar, but an array of radars can compensate if they are working in concert with a computer. Whirlwind gave Heart his first taste of programming in a real-time environment. When Whirlwind was transferred to Lincoln Lab, Heart was transferred with it. “It was the most painless kind of job change one could imagine,” Heart said.

  Many programs in the 1950s were written in “machine language,” the actual instructions in the “natural language” of the computer. Commands had to be specified in exhaustive detail; there was a one-to-one correspondence between each line of the program and each instruction to the machine. Working in machine language could be tedious, and mistakes were difficult to find and correct. But it gave programmers a strong sense of identification with the machine. Computer programming was still so new that few people understood its intricacies. Many who worked in the more traditional sciences ignored (or dismissed) those who were exploring computers as a science.

  Lincoln Laboratory was proving to be a perfect incubator for the kind of genius that ARPA would need to push computing into the interactive, and interconnected, age. It had already turned into a breeding ground for some of the most important early work in computing and networking. Many of its alumni—among them, Licklider, Roberts, Heart, and others still to come—would play crucial roles in the design and development of the ARPA network. In the early days, computer programmers at Lincoln were poorly regarded. Only full-fledged physicists and mathematicians were allowed on the research staff, and many programmers left Lincoln as a result. But Heart broke through the prejudice. He started out as a graduate student programmer, became a staff member, and before long he was running a group.

  Heart also disregarded the rules. He had little tolerance for professional delineations and didn’t take titles too seriously. When a young programmer named Dave Walden came to work at Lincoln, he was hired on with the title of technical assistant. The fact that this was not a staff-level post was clearly indicated on his security badge. Titles were important at Lincoln, and among other things, the badge kept him out of staff-member seminars. Ignoring all that, and flouting the protocol that assigned nonstaff to the least-desirable work space, Heart set Walden up in an office with one of Walden’s mentors, a young MIT graduate named Will Crowther. Crowther was a physicist turned computer scientist.

  In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Heart, Crowther, and others close to them worked on one groundbreaking project after another. In time, Heart and his team at Lincoln became experts at connecting a variety of measuring devices to computers via phone lines for information gathering. This in turn made them experts in building real-time computing systems.

  When a group of Heart’s colleagues left to start MITRE Corporation in 1958, Heart remained firmly moored to Lincoln, partly because he had always disliked change and partly because he loved what he was doing. He couldn’t imagine ever having a more interesting job or a more talented group with which to work.

  In the summer of 1965, Heart met Danny Bobrow, who had been working on artificial intelligence at BBN. Bobrow suggested to Heart that he leave Lincoln for a job at BBN, overseeing a project to introduce computer technology into hospitals. When Heart declined, Dick Bolt stepped in.

  One of the reasons the principals at BBN were anxious to woo Heart was that he had fruitful experience in putting together systems that worked efficiently in the field. The company needed someone like that. For all its inn
ovation, BBN hadn’t been very successful at turning its ideas into functioning, usable systems. “The culture at BBN at the time was to do interesting things and move on to the next interesting thing,” said one former employee. There was more incentive to come up with interesting ideas and explore them than to try to capitalize on them once they had been developed.

  Bolt invited Heart to his house. They had more meetings at BBN. They met at the local Howard Johnson’s. Heart remained reluctant, but there were aspects of the BBN job that appealed to him. Like Licklider, Heart had always held what he described as a “dogooder’s” view: Heart believed computers and technology could help society. Wedded as it was to the military, Lincoln Lab had never gone very far afield of the Air Force’s needs. In fact, the lab’s narrow focus had precipitated the departure of people like Ken Olsen and Wes Clark, who left to build computers. Heart was also interested in the application of computers to the life sciences, and Bolt let him know he would have the opportunity to pursue that interest at BBN. Moreover, a friend of Heart’s from Yonkers, Jerry Elkind, was at BBN, and Heart respected Elkind quite a bit. “It also occurred to me,” Heart admitted, “that there was a chance I could make some money at a private corporation.”

  In the end, Bolt convinced him to take the job, but by the time Heart got to BBN, the company’s computer research was being carried out by two separate divisions: information sciences and computer systems. As a general rule, those with Ph.D.’s worked in the information sciences, or research, division, while those without Ph.D.’s worked in the computer systems division. One member of the information sciences division described the computer systems division as consisting of a bunch of guys with soldering irons. In other words, they just got things built, while those in the research division considered themselves more concerned with inventing the future. There was not much cross-pollination between the two groups. They worked in separate buildings, divided by a narrow, glass-enclosed footbridge. It wasn’t animosity, exactly, that separated them, nor was it rivalry. Each was aware of the other’s limitations, resulting in a conspicuous lack of interest in what happened in the other camp. Frank Heart was a systems guy through and through.