The National Science Foundation announced yesterday that its brand-new test bed for Internet redesign would be run by the firm that first figured out how to connect computers at separate universities in the 1960s.
BBN Technologies Corporation will receive as much as $10-million to get the NSF's Global Environment for Network Innovation, or GENI, up and running. GENI's focus, according to a statement on its Web site, is to allow researchers "to experiment with radical network designs in a way that is far more realistic than they can today. Researchers will be able to build their own new versions of the 'net.'"
The first big chore falling to BBN will be to come up with plans and a budget to do all that, and to get it approved by the science foundation. Out of that effort will come grants to academic and industry researchers.
Arguably, BBN has more Internet experience than any other company. In 1969 it led the effort to connect computers at four universities, a linkage that became ARPAnet, the original backbone of today's Internet. –Josh Fischman
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