[davidbalbert]

Beranek and BBN both make an appearance in Mitch Waldrop's excellent book "The Dream Machine," which is in theory a biography of J.C.R. Licklider (who was mentioned in the obit), but in practice a history of computing from the 1930s onward. It has been out of print for some time, but a Kindle edition just came out this summer[1]. It's a great book and worth many times the $3.99 Amazon is charging for it.

[1]. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01FIPHEXM

[vidarh]

I'd like to second that, and mention that it's excellent to combine with "What the Dormouse Said" (John Markoff) and "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" (Steven Levy).

Very loosely, while there is lots of overlap between the three, Markoff covers the West Coast more thoroughly, with more material around his idea that a lot of the development there owes a great deal to LSD...

Levy covers the East Coast more thoroughly, going into a lot of detail about MIT, and the environment around the MIT AI Lab.

While Waldrop both goes further back, and takes a higher level view of the politics and DARPA itself.

There are of course plenty of other pieces to branch off into once you get to the rise of home computing in particular, but the above three books combine to give an even more fascinating picture of the early days of computing than they do separately. And BBN of course still stands out as one of the highly important pieces.

BBN is one of those companies that are fascinating to me, because like e.g. DEC, when I first got online in '93, they were the type of legendary that you when you are young take note of the status of, but don't really know the significance of, until you get a bit older and start being interested in the history of what you've built your career on...