Robert E. Kahn is the American engineer who, with Vint Cerf, co-invented the protocols at the heart of the internet. His Internet Hall of Fame profile, where he was inducted in 2012, describes him as “the co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocols” and credits him with being “responsible for originating DARPA’s Internet program.” That program turned a set of separate research networks into a single internetwork.
Kahn’s early career spanned Bell Laboratories, MIT, and the firm Bolt Beranek and Newman, where he worked on the design of the ARPANET, the packet-switched network that was the internet’s direct ancestor. He then joined DARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office, eventually serving as its director. From that position he launched the internetworking research that produced TCP/IP and, as his biography notes, initiated the United States government’s billion-dollar Strategic Computing Program.
The technical breakthrough he shared with Cerf was the open-architecture networking model: the idea that many different networks could be joined by gateways without any one network having to change its internal design. They set out this model in their 1974 paper “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication,” which introduced TCP and the gateway concept. The protocol was later divided into TCP and IP, the two layers that still define how the internet moves data.
In 1986 Kahn founded the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), a not-for-profit organization for research and development of the national information infrastructure, where he led work on mobile programs, digital object architecture, and the Handle System. He and Cerf received the U.S. National Medal of Technology in 1997 and the ACM A.M. Turing Award in 2004 for their pioneering work on internetworking and the design and implementation of the internet’s basic communications protocols.