7 Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf 7networks all over the world to route and assemble data
packets. TCP, which originally included the Internet
protocol (IP), a global addressing mechanism that allowed
routers to get data packets to their ultimate destination,
formed the TCP/IP standard, which was adopted by the U.S.
Department of Defense in 1980. TCP/IP is now the
standard Internet communications protocol that allows
digital computers to communicate over long distances. In
acknowledgement of their role as two of the principal
architects of the Internet, Kahn and Cerf received the
2004 A.M. Turing Award from the Association for
Computing Machinery.
Robert Kahn
After receiving an engineering degree from City College
of New York in 1960, Robert Elliot Kahn received his
M.A. (1962) and Ph.D. (1964) in electrical engineering
from Princeton University. Immediately after completing
his doctorate, Kahn worked for Bell Laboratories and
subsequently served as an assistant professor of electrical
engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technol-
ogy (MIT) from 1964– 66. However, it was his role as a
senior scientist at Bolt Beranek & Newman (BB&N), an
engineering consulting firm located in Cambridge, Mass.,
that brought Kahn into contact with the planning for a
new kind of computer network, the Advanced Research
Project Network (ARPANET).
ARPANET was named for its sponsor, the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. The
network was based on a radically different architecture
known as packet switching, in which messages were split
into multiple “packets” that traveled independently over
many different circuits to their common destination. But
the ARPANET was more than a predecessor to the