Robert E. Kahn

Robert E. Kahn, along with Vinton G. Cerf, invented the TCP/IP protocol, the technology used to transmit information on the modern Internet. He received a B.E.E. from the City College of New York in 1960, and a M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University in 1962 and 1964 respectively. He worked for a while at Bell Laboratories and as an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT. He took a leave of absence from MIT to join Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), where he was responsible for the system design of the ARPANET, the first packet-switched network. In 1972 he moved to DARPA, and in October of that year, he demonstrated ARPANET by connecting 40 different computers at the International Computer Communication Conference, publicizing the network to the general public for the first time. After he became Director of DARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), he started the United States government's billion dollar Strategic Computing Program, the largest computer research and development program ever undertaken by the federal government. He came up with the initial ideas for the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) while working on a satellite packet network. While working on this project, he would form the basis of open-architecture networking, which would allow networks all over the world communicate with each other regardless of what hardware or software the computers on each network used. To fullfill this dream, he designed TCP to have the following features:

• Small sub-sections of the main network would be able to talk to each other through a some sort of device (later called a gateway and now a router)\n* No portion of the network would be the single point of failure, or would be able to control the whole network.\n* If information broadcast from one computer to another was lost, the information would be retransmitted.\n* Any computer could connect to the network without making any internal changes to it.

Vinton G. Cerf joined him on the project in the spring of 1973, and together completed TCP, which they modelled after another network protocol, the Networking Control Protocol. Later, it was layered with the Internet Protocol (IP). The are usually referred together as TCP/IP and are the basis for the modern Internet. After thirteen years with DARPA, he left to found the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), and as of 2003 is the Chairman, CEO and President. CNRI is a not-for-profit organization to provide leadership and funding for research and development of the National Information Infrastructure.

References

\n* Biography of Robert E. Kahn on the Corporation for National Research Initiatives' website.\n* Bio of Robert E. Kahn from the Living Internet. Kahn, Bob\nKahn, Bob