Boomerang III mast

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--In the 1960s, BBN Technologies, a research and development company here in this town dominated by MIT and Harvard, created the packet switch and ARPANET, and arguably got the Internet Age under way.

Over the years, the company has continued to innovate, and is today the No. 1 contractor for DARPA, the U.S. Defense Advance Research Projects Agency. It was bought in 2009 by Raytheon.

These days, the company has nearly 800 employees and it is working on dozens of projects across a wide spectrum of disciplines.

During a Road Trip 2010 visit, CNET reporter Daniel Terdiman got a chance to see three of them: The Boomerang III, a system designed to give combat soldiers a nearly instantaneous report on where gunfire directed at them has come from--something that is critical in urban warfare where it is hard to hear and where gunshot blasts can echo off buildings; an instant English to Pashto or Arabic translation system that allows soldiers to have a simple conversations with a non-English speaker in Iraq or Afghanistan; and a Multimedia Monitoring System, that automatically records, indexes, and monitors multimedia news coming across the Internet.

This is the mast of Boomerang III, the third iteration of the mobile acoustic shot detection system.

Click here to read the related story on BBN Technologies, and click here to check out the entire Road Trip 2010 package.