Xconomy, an online-only tech/business magazine that has Boston as one of its three hub cities, has a good piece riffing off the news that Boston’s BBN -  formerly Beranek, Bolt & Newman, which developed lots of the tidbits that make up modern networked computing  -  was sold to Raytheon on the same day that the Internet turned 40. From the article:

Founded by a pair of MIT professors as an acoustic consulting firm, BBN has had a hand in the development of an eclectic range of important digital technologies, including parallel processing, speech recognition, the Logo educational software language, genetic algorithms, satellite communications, and the @ sign in e-mail addresses.

There’s no connection between the sale and the sort-of birthday (when did the Internet start? what is the sound of one network coupling?) but it’s a fun, instructive read. Among other things, it says the sale could help the 700-employee BBN create more interesting stuff.

Here’s the company’s interactive timeline, if you want to indulge in some tech nostalgia.

Tags: BBN