- Person
- Robert Kahn
- Lived
- b. 1938
- Field
- Computer networking
- From
- American
The story
Robert Kahn was born in Brooklyn in 1938 into an Ashkenazi Jewish family and studied electrical engineering at the City College of New York and Princeton. At the Cambridge firm Bolt Beranek and Newman he helped design the ARPANET, the Pentagon-funded computer network launched in 1969, and in October 1972 he organised a public demonstration in Washington that connected some twenty different computers and convinced many people that packet networking was real.
Later that year Kahn moved to DARPA, the Pentagon’s research agency, where he faced a new problem. The agency now had several very different networks: the wired ARPANET, a packet radio network and a satellite network linking to Europe. Each worked differently, and the ARPANET’s protocol could not connect them. Kahn began designing a way for independent networks, each built however its owners liked, to join together, an idea he called open-architecture networking. In 1973 he brought in Vint Cerf, and in May 1974 they published A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication.
Their design joined networks through gateways, now called routers, that simply forwarded packets. No single part could fail or control the whole. Every piece of data carried a sequence number and a checksum, receivers acknowledged what arrived, and anything lost was sent again. The protocol was later split into TCP, which keeps a conversation complete and in order, and IP, which moves packets between networks. After a transition planned by Jon Postel, the ARPANET switched every connected computer to TCP/IP on January 1, 1983, a date Cerf has called the birth of the operational internet.
Because TCP/IP does not care what hardware or software a network uses, and because no company owns it, anyone can connect. That openness let the internet grow from a few hundred research computers to billions of phones, laptops and devices. Kahn and Cerf received the Turing Award in 2004 for this work.
Why it matters
TCP/IP lets billions of people and devices on different networks reach each other freely, the foundation of the open internet.
About Robert Kahn
Brooklyn-born engineer who, with Vint Cerf, designed TCP/IP, the shared language that lets any network join the internet. He also helped build and launch the ARPANET that came before it.
Sources
- Robert E. Kahn National Inventors Hall of Fame
- Marking the birth of the modern-day Internet Google (The Keyword)
- Robert Kahn Internet Hall of Fame
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.