BBN Technologies

BBN, now styled RTX BBN Technologies, is an American research and development company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It began as a consulting partnership formed on 15 October 1948 by the MIT professors Leo Beranek and Richard Bolt, took on Robert Newman in 1950, and traded as Bolt, Beranek and Newman. Acoustics came first, but from the late 1950s the firm turned to computing, buying a PDP-1 and hosting early time-sharing work. In August 1968 ARPA selected BBN to build the Interface Message Processors, the first routers of the ARPANET. It became a wholly owned subsidiary of Raytheon in 2009 and is now part of RTX Corporation. Its later research covers quantum key distribution, speech recognition and network security.