Robert Kahn, in full Robert Elliot Kahn, byname Bob, (born December 23, 1938, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.), American electrical engineer, one of many principal architects, with Vinton Cerf, of the Internet. In 2004 each Kahn and Cerf received the A.M. Turing Award, the very best honour in pc science, for his or her “pioneering work on internetworking, including the design and implementation of the Internet’s basic communications protocols, TCP/IP, and for inspired leadership in networking.”
After receiving an engineering diploma from City College of New York in 1960, Kahn acquired a grasp’s diploma (1962) and a doctorate (1964) in electrical engineering from Princeton University. Immediately after finishing his doctorate, Kahn labored for Bell Laboratories and subsequently served as an assistant professor {of electrical} engineering on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1964 to 1966. However, it was his function as a senior scientist at Bolt Beranek & Newman (BB&N), an engineering consulting agency positioned in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that introduced Kahn into contact with the planning for a brand new form of pc community, the ARPANET.
ARPANET was named for its sponsor, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. The community was primarily based on a radically totally different structure often known as packet switching, during which messages had been break up into a number of “packets” that traveled independently over many alternative circuits to their frequent vacation spot. But the ARPANET was greater than a predecessor to the Internet—it was the frequent technological context during which a whole technology of pc scientists got here of age. While at BB&N, Kahn had two main accomplishments. First, he was a part of a bunch that designed the community’s Interface Message Processor, which might mediate between the community and every establishment’s host pc. Second, and maybe extra essential, in 1972 Kahn helped manage the primary International Conference on Computer Communication, which served because the ARPANET’s public debut.
In 1972 Kahn left BB&N for DARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). There he confronted a set of issues associated to the deployment of packet switching know-how in navy radio and satellite tv for pc communications. However, the actual technical drawback lay in connecting these disparate navy networks—therefore the identify Internet for a community of networks. As program supervisor and later director of IPTO, Kahn labored carefully with Cerf and others on the event of the Internet’s technical protocol, TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), which separated packet error checking (TCP) from points associated to domains and locations (IP). The protocol is the idea for the Internet’s open structure, which allows any pc with the suitable connection to enter the community. In addition to his work on the Internet, Kahn was the designer of the U.S. navy’s Strategic Computing Initiative in the course of the administration of Pres. Ronald Reagan. Kahn additionally coined the phrase “national information infrastructure” throughout this era.
Upon leaving IPTO in 1985, Kahn served as president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, a not-for-profit group positioned in Reston, Virginia, and devoted to the event of community applied sciences for the general public. In 2001 he was amongst 4 people honoured by the U.S. National Academy of Engineering with the Charles Stark Draper Prize for his function in creating the Internet. Kahn’s different honours included the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2005). In addition, in 2012 he was an inaugural inductee within the Internet Hall of Fame. Kahn is the writer of Encyclopædia Britannica’s article Internet.