Robert E. Kahn

Robert Elliot Kahn
Bob Kahn in Geneva, May 2013
Born	Robert Elliott Kahn (1938-12-23) December 23, 1938 (age 78) Brooklyn, New York
Nationality	American
Alma mater	City College of New York (B.E.E., 1960) Princeton University (M.A., 1962; Ph.D., 1964)
Organization	Bell Labs MIT BBN DARPA Corporation for National Research Initiatives
Known for	TCP/IP
Style	Telecommunications, networking
Spouse(s)	Patrice Ann Lyons
Awards	Marconi Prize (1994) National Medal of Technology (1997) National Medal of Technology and Innovation (1997) IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal (1997) Charles Stark Draper Prize (2001) Prince of Asturias Award (2002) Turing Award (2004) Presidential Medal of Freedom (2005) Computer History Museum Fellow (2006) Japan Prize (2008) Harold Pender Award (2010) Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (2013)

Robert Elliot "Bob" Kahn (born December 23, 1938) is an American electrical engineer, who, along with Vint Cerf, invented the (TCP) and the (IP), the fundamental communication protocols at the heart of the Internet.

Kahn was born in New York to parents Beatrice Pauline (née Tashker) and Lawrence Kahn, a high school administrator. 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 earned M.A. In 1972, he began work at 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 Computer Communication Conference, "the watershed event that made people suddenly realize that packet switching was a real technology." 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.

After thirteen years with DARPA, he left to found the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) in 1986, and as of 2015 is the Chairman, CEO and President.

While working on a satellite packet network project, he came up with the initial ideas for what later became the (TCP), which was intended as a replacement for an earlier network protocol, NCP, used in the ARPANET. While working on this, he 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: