Robert Kahn: The Engineer Who Designed the Language That Connected the World

On December twenty-third, nineteen thirty-eight, Robert Elliot Kahn was born in Brooklyn, New York, USA. He is a computer scientist and engineer, and his academic field is computer networking and protocols.

Kahn is one of the principal architects of the Internet. While working for DARPA in the 1970s, he faced the challenge of getting different computer networks to communicate with each other. Together with Vinton Cerf, he developed the solution: the TCP/IP protocol suite (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). This was the fundamental communication language that defined how data should be packaged, addressed, transmitted, and received across diverse networks. The ingenious design of TCP/IP, with its decentralized and fault-tolerant structure, laid the very cornerstone for the global "network of networks" we know today as the Internet. Kahn also led the development of ARPANET, the Internet's direct predecessor. For this groundbreaking work, Kahn and Cerf were awarded the Turing Award in 2004 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005. His work has not only revolutionized communication but has also formed the infrastructure of the modern information age.