I worked at BBN briefly, in the late 90s. My favorite part, besides the great people, was the collection of classic computing hardware. They had a warehouse th

I worked at BBN briefly, in the late 90s. My favorite part, besides the great people, was the collection of classic computing hardware. They had a warehouse that I really should have spent more time in; during my one visit, to rescue a massive hard drive (physically massive, only 1GB capacity), I spotted multiple IMPs and a pallet of early Macs. The security R&D department where I worked had a Sparc laptop for its demo computer; only time I’ve ever worked on one, or even seen one. My least favorite part was the huge 10base2 LAN. First and only time I’ve had to deal with those fragile terminators, plus the AppleTalk repeater in a closet nearby that someone would frequently bump and cause a network storm. And of course we were all using NFS, which at the time was completely unable to deal gracefully with a disconnection from the server (no idea whether that has changed since then). Fun times. Amazing company and history, and working in Cambridge was a delight; I had a (relatively) cheap apartment in Somerville right outside Davis Square, and could ride a bike to work without much difficulty, or ride the Red Line for just one stop. Not having to drive my car anywhere was a revelation.