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What I did at BBN

The last thing I did at BBN was to work in the Systems & Technologies division. I worked on the FrontDoor project in the Internet Products Group. FrontDoor was a package of hardware and software that provided a school or small business with internet services such as e-mail, mailing lists, newsgroups and web and gopher servers. The server itself was a Pentium PC running BSDI UNIX , although it also ran on Solaris x86. The feature that set FrontDoor apart from its competition was that the entire server was administered from a Macintosh or Windows application. From the FrontDoor client application, you could add accounts, create mailing lists, newsgroups, manage newsfeeds, the gopher server and the web server. The idea was that you didn't need to know anything about UNIX in order to administer the Internet Server. There was also a web version of FrontDoor, for which I wrote the DNS management tool.

Previously at BBN I worked at BBN Software Products (renamed Domain Solutions and now part of Brooks Automation) on the data visualization & statistical analysis product called BBN Cornerstone. Cornerstone provides a spreadsheet-like interface to view your data along with dynamically linked analysis and graphs. Cornerstone runs on UNIX machines and Windows under NT, Windows 95 and Windows 3.1 using Win32s. Initially, I managed the team that built the graphs subsystem and later I worked on the port from UNIX to Win32.

Before that I was involved in building the Designer expert system for designing network topologies (built in Common Lisp on the Symbolics Lisp Machine), several network analysis tools such as ANT (Automated Network Troubleshooter) and DDA (Datascope Debugging Assistant).

My first job at BBN was working in the ARPAnet group in BBN Division 5. I worked on the NU (Network Utilities) network management system that was used to remotely manage the ARPAnet, the Milnet, the nacent Internet and other BBN packet networks.