Kahn was born in New York to parents Beatrice Pauline (née Tashker) and Lawrence Kahn in an Ashkenazi Jewish family.[2][3][4][5][6] Through his father, he is related to futurist Herman Kahn. After receiving a B.E.E. degree in electrical engineering from the City College of New York in 1960, Kahn went on to Princeton University where he earned a M.A. in 1962 and Ph.D. in 1964, both in electrical engineering. At Princeton, he was advised by Bede Liu and completed a doctoral dissertation titled "Some problems in the sampling and modulation of signals."[7][8] He first worked at Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., then in 1972 joined the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) within DARPA. In the fall of 1972, he demonstrated the ARPANET by connecting 20 different computers at the International Conference on Computer Communications (ICCC), "the watershed event that made people suddenly realize that packet switching was a real technology."[9] He then helped develop the TCP/IP protocols for connecting diverse computer networks. After he became director of IPTO, he started the United States government's billion dollar Strategic Computing Initiative, the largest computer research and development program ever undertaken by the U.S. federal government.[10]
While working on the SATNET satellite packet network project, he came up with the initial ideas for what later became the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which was intended as a replacement for an earlier network protocol, NCP, used in the ARPANET. TCP played a major role in forming the basis of open-architecture networking, which would allow computers and networks all over the world to communicate with each other, regardless of what hardware or software the computers on each network used. To reach this goal, TCP was designed to have the following features:
Small sub-sections of the whole network would be able to talk to each other through a specialized computer that only forwarded packets (first called a gateway, and now called a router).
No portion of the network would be the single point of failure, or would be able to control the whole network.
Each piece of information sent through the network would be given a sequence number, to ensure that they were dealt with in the right order at the destination computer, and to detect the loss of any of them.
A computer which sent information to another computer would know that it was successfully received when the destination computer sent back a special packet, called an acknowledgement (ACK), for that particular piece of information.
If information sent from one computer to another was lost, the information would be retransmitted, after the loss was detected by a timeout, which would recognize that the expected acknowledgement had not been received.
Each piece of information sent through the network would be accompanied by a checksum, calculated by the original sender, and checked by the ultimate receiver, to ensure that it was not damaged in any way en route.
Vint Cerf joined him on the project in the spring of 1973, and together they completed an early version of TCP. Later, the protocol was separated into two separate layers: host-to-host communication would be handled by TCP, with Internet Protocol (IP) handling internetwork communication.[12] The two together are usually referred to as TCP/IP, and form part of the basis for the modern Internet.
In 1992 he co-founded with Vint Cerf the Internet Society, to provide leadership in Internet related standards, education, and policy.
Awards
In 1981, Bob Kahn was elevated to the grade of IEEE fellow for original work in packet switching mobile radio telecommunications technology.[13] He was elected as a member to the National Academy of Engineering in 1987 for research contributions in computer networks and packet switching, and for creative management contributions to research efforts in computers and communications. He was elected a Founding Fellow of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 1990.[14]
He was awarded the SIGCOMM Award in 1993 for "visionary technical contributions and leadership in the development of information systems technology", and shared the 2004 Turing Award with Vint Cerf, for "pioneering work on internetworking, including .. the Internet's basic communications protocols .. and for inspired leadership in networking."
Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn being awarded the Presidential Medal Of Freedom by President Bush
He is a recipient of the AFIPS Harry Goode Memorial Award, the Marconi Award, the ACM SIGCOMM Award, the President's Award from ACM, the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computer and Communications Award, the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, the IEEE Third Millennium Medal, the ACM Software Systems Award, the Computerworld/Smithsonian Award, the ASIS Special Award and the Public Service Award from the Computing Research Board. He has twice received the Secretary of Defense Civilian Service Award.
He was awarded the Stibitz-Wilson Award from the American Computer & Robotics Museum in 1999 for Pioneering the Internet through Major Design and Development Contributor to the Original ARPANET NCP Protocol and Co-Inventor of the Internet's TCP/IP Protocol.[15]
In 2005 he was awarded the Townsend Harris Medal from the Alumni Association of the City College of New York, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the C & C Prize in Tokyo, Japan.
He was inducted as a Fellow of the Computer History Museum in 2006 "for pioneering technical contributions to internetworking and for leadership in the application of networks to scientific research."[17]
He was awarded the 2008 Japan Prize for his work in "Information Communication Theory and Technology" (together with Vinton Cerf).
Kahn received the 2024 IEEE Medal of Honor for "pioneering technical and leadership contributions in packet communication technologies and foundations of the Internet."[21]
Honorary degrees
Kahn has received honorary degrees from Princeton University, University of Pavia, ETH Zurich, University of Maryland, George Mason University, the University of Central Florida and the University of Pisa, and an honorary fellowship from University College, London.
The history of the Internet has its origin in the efforts of scientists and engineers to build and interconnect computer networks. The Internet Protocol Suite, the set of rules used to communicate between networks and devices on the Internet, arose from research and development in the United States and involved international collaboration, particularly with researchers in the United Kingdom and France.
Internetworking is the practice of interconnecting multiple computer networks, such that any pair of hosts in the connected networks can exchange messages irrespective of their hardware-level networking technology. The resulting system of interconnected networks are called an internetwork, or simply an internet.
The Internet Protocol (IP) is the network layer communications protocol in the Internet protocol suite for relaying datagrams across network boundaries. Its routing function enables internetworking, and essentially establishes the Internet.
The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suite are the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), and the Internet Protocol (IP). Early versions of this networking model were known as the Department of Defense (DoD) model because the research and development were funded by the United States Department of Defense through DARPA.
Vinton Gray Cerf is an American Internet pioneer and is recognized as one of "the fathers of the Internet", sharing this title with TCP/IP co-developer Bob Kahn.
In telecommunications, packet switching is a method of grouping data into packets that are transmitted over a digital network. Packets are made of a header and a payload. Data in the header is used by networking hardware to direct the packet to its destination, where the payload is extracted and used by an operating system, application software, or higher layer protocols. Packet switching is the primary basis for data communications in computer networks worldwide.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. The ARPANET was established by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense.
Leonard Kleinrock is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science.
Donald Watts Davies, was a Welsh computer scientist who was employed at the UK National Physical Laboratory (NPL).
The CYCLADES computer network was a French research network created in the early 1970s. It was one of the pioneering networks experimenting with the concept of packet switching and, unlike the ARPANET, was explicitly designed to facilitate internetworking.
Louis Pouzin is a French computer scientist. He designed a pioneering packet communications network, CYCLADES that was the first to implement the end-to-end principle, which became fundamental to the design of the Internet.
The PARC Universal Packet was one of the two earliest internetworking protocol suites; it was created by researchers at Xerox PARC in the mid-1970s. The entire suite provided routing and packet delivery, as well as higher level functions such as a reliable byte stream, along with numerous applications.
Lawrence Gilman Roberts was an American engineer who received the Draper Prize in 2001 "for the development of the Internet", and the Principe de Asturias Award in 2002.
Peter Thomas Kirstein was a British computer scientist who played a role in the creation of the Internet. He made the first internetworking connection on the ARPANET in 1973, by providing a link to British academic networks, and was instrumental in defining and implementing TCP/IP alongside Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn.
Danny Cohen was an Israeli American computer scientist specializing in computer networking. He was involved in the ARPAnet project and helped develop various fundamental applications for the Internet. He was one of the key figures behind the separation of TCP and IP ; this allowed the later creation of UDP.
The NPL network, or NPL Data Communications Network, was a local area computer network operated by a team from the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in London that pioneered the concept of packet switching.
Roger Anthony Scantlebury is a British computer scientist who worked at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and later at Logica.
The International Network Working Group (INWG) was a group of prominent computer science researchers in the 1970s who studied and developed standards and protocols for computer networking. Set up in 1972 as an informal group to consider the technical issues involved in connecting different networks, its goal was to develop international standard protocols for internetworking. INWG became a subcommittee of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) two years later. Concepts developed by members of the group contributed to the original "Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication" proposed by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in 1974 and the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) that emerged later.
A long-running debate in computer science known as the Protocol Wars occurred from the 1970s to the 1990s, when engineers, organizations and nations became polarized over the issue of which communication protocol would result in the best and most robust computer networks. This culminated in the Internet–OSI Standards War in the 1980s and early 1990s, which was ultimately "won" by the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) by the mid-1990s and has since resulted in most of the competing protocols disappearing.
↑ "Robert E Kahn". A. M. Turing Award. ACM. 2004. Archived from the original on July 3, 2012. Retrieved January 23, 2010. For pioneering work on internetworking, including the design and implementation of the Internet's basic communications protocols, TCP/IP, and for inspired leadership in networking.
↑ "Robert E Kahn". ACM Fellows. ACM. 2001. Retrieved January 23, 2010. For leadership in the design of the Internet, strategic computing, digital libraries, digital object infrastructure and digital intellectual property protection technology.
Oral history interview with Robert E. Kahn, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Focuses on Kahn's role in the development of computer networking from 1967 through the early 1980s. Beginning with his work at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), Kahn discusses his involvement as the ARPANET proposal was being written, his decision to become active in its implementation, and his role in the public demonstration of the ARPANET. The interview continues into Kahn's involvement with networking when he moves to IPTO in 1972, where he was responsible for the administrative and technical evolution of the ARPANET, including programs in packet radio, the development of a new network protocol (TCP/IP), and the switch to TCP/IP to connect multiple networks.
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