BBN Technologies, Inc.

The entity sits on the left and its connections fan out by role on the right; the graph shows each group’s most confident connections, and the full list below carries every relationship.

Full list

• The Core That Had to Stop Being the Core: EGP and the Invention of Autonomous Systems

  The early Internet did not decentralize by pretending that every network agreed. It learned to survive disagreement. The Exterior Gateway Protocol drew a boundary around what one routing administration could keep private and what it had to tell its neighbours. That boundary made autonomy practical, but EGP’s privileged core and thin evidence could not carry a meshed Internet. The machinery built around its omissions—and the AS path that followed—shows how a federation replaces a centre without replacing responsibility.

  Primary articlePublished 2026-08-21
• The Mail Address That Outlived Its Server: How MX Records Separated Identity from Delivery

  An email address looks like a destination. In the early Internet, it often was: a mailer could take the domain after `@`, open SMTP to the machine with that name and hope the mailbox lived there. In January 1986, RFC 974 described why that assumption had stopped scaling—and how one small DNS record let the address remain while the receiving machine moved.

  Primary articlePublished 2026-08-21
• Where the Network Stopped: The IMP, the Host, and the First Price of Shared Correctness

  ARPANET’s Interface Message Processor made packet switching operational by putting substantial machinery into a dedicated subnet. It also made a harder problem visible: infrastructure can carry, check, meter and protect communication without possessing the knowledge required to make communication correct. The Internet emerged when designers learned to preserve that distinction across networks—and to keep authority from expanding farther than the function actually delivered.

  Primary articlePublished 2026-08-21