Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Distilled

Business Messaging for the Masses

You may not have heard of a company called Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN) or a BBN engineer named Ray Tomlinson. Nor might you be aware of their impact on business messaging and collaboration. In 1948, two professors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Richard Bolt and Leo Beranek, started a small consulting firm in the field of acoustics. A year later, they hired one of Bolt's former students—Robert Newman—and founded BBN. Between 1948 and 1997, BBN was a small, independent research and development company that worked on various ways to improve sound and sound quality, reduce noise pollution from aircraft, and establish standards for noise metrics.

GTE purchased BBN in 1997 (which at that time had ...