BBN Internet Server Chosen by State of Florida for Schoolyear 2000 Project.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--November 11, 1994 -- BBN Systems and Technologies, a division of Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. (NYSE:BBN), today announced that the Florida Department of Education has purchased seven of its new Internet Servers for use in their Schoolyear 2000 project. The BBN Internet ServerTM will provide students, teachers, and administrators with advanced electronic tools to participate in an information-age educational environment.

The Florida Schoolyear 2000 project involves the design and development of a new educational model for Florida's schools. It is a large-scale, system-wide effort to increase the productivity of public school students in Florida through developing, testing, and implementing a technology-supported school system. The Schoolyear 2000 model will enable Florida students to improve their school performance and obtain the skills they need to participate successfully in tomorrow's technology-driven workforce.

The BBN Internet Server is particularly well suited to this type of networked education. It is the first full-featured server that school staff can manage day-to-day -- regardless of their technical expertise. It includes widely used server functions, such as electronic mail, network news bulletin boards, and a file retrieval server (FTP) that provide excellent resources for learning. The Internet Server supports Gopher and World Wide Web databases that guide students and teachers to information from all over the world. With customized bulletin boards and a Web database, the server becomes the school organization's front door to the Internet.

The BBN Internet comes with a personal computer program called FrontDoorTM. FrontDoor allows the school staff to customize and administer the server without having to access the server's underlying UNIX operating system.

"We were concerned at the outset of this project that a network such as this might be difficult to operate," says Dr. Owen Gaede, director of the Schoolyear 2000 project. "The people in many of our districts were concerned about the difficulty of managing UNIX servers. The BBN Internet Server was attractive because it was easy to learn and understand. It performs a variety of functions and it can be administered right from a desktop," he said.

According to Dr. Denis Newman, director of BBN's education network systems group, "We are excited about the potential benefits that this partnership with Florida's Schoolyear 2000 represents. This collaboration will assure that Schoolyear 2000 stays at the cutting edge of Internet resources while giving BBN an important testbed for integrating Internet capabilities into a new educational model for the information age. This project will service as a foundation for our introduction of Internet-based curriculum and communication services to schools nationwide."

The BBN Internet Server software is being installed on Sun workstations in each of the seven participating counties and will serve a total of 35 schools throughout the state. BBN is providing training for the county staff, staff from the Florida Information Resource Network, the state operated network to which the schools are connected, and the staff of Florida State University's Center for Educational Technology in Tallahassee where the Schoolyear 2000 project is centered.

Version 1.1 of the BBN Internet Server, which is sold as a bundled software and Intel Pentium hardware platform, was released this week and is on display at the Third International Conference on Telecommunications in Education (Tel-Ed) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. BBN servers are currently operating in K-12 sites nationwide. In addition to the Internet Server, BBN's Educational Technologies department offers a full line of support and training services to the education market.

BBN Systems and Technologies is recognized as a world leader in the development of ground-breaking technologies that help people learn and work together. BBN provides products and services for a wide range of applications including K-12 education; network systems; distributed systems; data visualization and analysis; computer speech recognition; collaborative systems; sensor systems; and active noise cancellation. For its fiscal year ended June 30, 1994, BBN had revenue of $196 million.

BBN Internet Server and FrontDoor are trademarks of Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc.

CONTACT: Catherine Miller

              Corporate Communications
              617/873-6113
                    or
              Denis Newman
              Director, Eductation Network Systems
              617/873-4277