MIT Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

MIT's Building 20: The Magical Incubator Story, Anecdote, or Reminiscence

Pre-net Networking, Before the ARPANet there was the Old Boy Net

John T. Weeks
WeeksJ@ConnRiver.net

Back in the very early 50's I was nominally an Architectural student trying to switch to acoustics in some way but being undercut by the math demanded of Leo Beranek's students. I was partially justifying my presence by doing dogwork for Bolt Beranek and Newman, having been swept in by Bob Newman's enthusiasm for Architectural Acoustics. Jerry Wiesner tapped me one day for a building project, to design and supervise the building of an acoustical studio in Building 20. Well I was full of the subject in those days and laid out a little room with independantly supported floor and wall-ceiling structures and non-parallel surfaces everywhere. The wall, ceiling and floor structures had "randomly" spaced studs and joists--the whole ball of wax! Independent padded suspension was in part demanded by the heavy traffic on the street just outside the windows. The only structural spec. I had was that one corner had to accommodate a Klipshorn,- a highly fashionable speaker system of those days. When you say networking, Building 20 was one humming net all of itself. You wanted room-response testing?- The Acoustics Lab was just down the hall. You needed something compact in narrow-band sound absorption? Uno Ingard had just done a paper on just that thing, using perforated masonite and cloth, carefully spaced from the wall. You needed someone to glue the stuff together? Just down another hall was the guy that had done Ingard's work. The place was humming with talent and training for almost anything one needed for the job. Contacts and shoe leather (and an ingratiating manner) were all that was needed. There was even a bloke with a granite surface-plate who would make up a ground-glass screen for my camera when it came time to illustrate my piece in the Quarterly Report. Not too long after the completion of the project, and the report, I received news that my GI bill time had run out and I left the warm confines of academe for the "real" world.