Robert E. Kahn
"A lot of people were thinking about these ideas. I was just fortunate to be in the position to propose to build it for real."
Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf created the architecture for the internet and collaborated to design the software known as the transmission control protocol/internet protocol, or TCP/IP, the basic internet protocols that specify how data is exchanged via the internet.
Kahn was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1938. He earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the City College of New York in 1960. He continued studying electrical engineering at Princeton University, where he earned his master’s degree in 1962 and his doctorate in 1964.
Following his doctoral studies, Kahn joined the technical staff at Bell Labs in 1964. In 1966, he accepted a position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he taught electrical engineering as an assistant professor. Because he wanted to devote more of his time to applied research, Kahn took a leave of absence from MIT and joined Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) as a senior scientist.
In 1968, while Kahn was at BBN, the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) issued a request for proposals to create an ambitious, large-scale network. This would become the ARPANET project. Laying the foundation for the internet, ARPANET used new techniques like packet switching, which enabled heterogeneous distributed computers to exchange packets of data.
At the time Kahn was hired at BBN, his area of expertise involved signal processing. However, his knowledge in communication networks allowed him to contribute greatly to the proposal that ultimately won the project for BBN. “A lot of people were thinking about these ideas,” Kahn recalled in an interview with the National Inventors Hall of Fame®. “I was just fortunate to be in the position to propose to build it for real.”
In October 1972, Kahn helped organize ARPANET’s successful public debut at the first International Conference of Computer Communication in Washington, D.C. Later that year, Kahn joined DARPA and subsequently became the director of its Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). Here, he focused on developing packet radio, packet satellite and even packet voice, which would later facilitate the creation of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) technology.
In 1973, Kahn called upon Cerf, a computer scientist and assistant professor at Stanford University, to help develop a technology that would allow computers to communicate over multiple heterogeneous networks. Kahn and Cerf had originally met in 1969, when Kahn had come to UCLA to test ARPANET. “Vint, as a computer scientist, thought of things in terms of bits and computer programs,” Kahn said. “As an electrical engineer, I thought about signals and bandwidth and the nondigital side of the world.”
With Kahn and Cerf each bringing a unique skill set to the endeavor, their collaborative efforts would result in TCP/IP. This was a revolutionary way to specify how data should be broken into packets, addressed, transmitted, routed and received at its destination. Kahn and Cerf’s design of TCP/IP prioritized reliability, ensuring that if any device on a network failed, the network could recover automatically. Reflecting on their work, Kahn said, “It was a great collaboration, and I think it was far better than either of us probably could have done on our own.”
Beginning in 1983, TCP/IP became the standard host protocol on ARPANET, one of the first three networks to be connected on the internet. This foundation enabled applications such as email to operate across a growing global internet and helped pave the way for later innovations, including the World Wide Web. In recognition of Kahn and Cerf’s foundational work, they are often called the “fathers of the internet.”
After leaving DARPA in 1985, Kahn founded and served as president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), a nonprofit group dedicated to the development of network technologies for the public. At CNRI, Kahn and Cerf focused on modern applications of the internet, such as digital libraries and e-messaging.
For Kahn’s remarkable impact on global communication and information processing, he is the recipient of numerous awards, including, with Cerf, the 1997 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the 2004 Turing Award, and the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005. Kahn received the IEEE Medal of Honor in 2024.