Bob Kahn & Vinton Cerf
Robert Kahn, along with Vinton Cerf, is a co-designer of the TCP/IP Internet network protocol. Kahn set the open architecture groundwork for the TCP/IP protocol, supplying the Internet with one of its most distinguishing features and what has turned out to be an important advantage. Together, Kahn and Cerf wrote their now-famous paper, "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication." The two produced what became the interlanguage of the Net -- TCP/IP -- which has been used to send information over the Internet ever since.
Native New Yorker Robert Kahn’s climb to spectacular internet trailblazer was not predestined. He made it happen. Born during the closing years of America’s Great Depression, Kahn’s family moved from their Brooklyn neighborhood to Flushing, Queens around 1953, when he was approximately thirteen. Like many of the innovators of the computer industry, Kahn was a gifted child, finishing his high school’s accelerated program in three years, advancing to college at a young age.
After high school, Kahn entered Queens College and remained there for two years before changing to City College, where he completed a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering two years later. Kahn views his undergraduate study at City College as period where he began to seriously consider his career. He didn't like chemical lab work but always enjoyed mathematics. In January 1960, he graduated and went to work for Bell Labs when their offices were in Manhattan. Later that year, Kahn received an honored fellowship from the National Science Foundation, and in September found himself in graduate school at Princeton University.
Upon completing graduate school in 1964, Kahn contacted Peter Elias, the chairman of MIT’s engineering department and he was invited to join the faculty in the fall. Eventually, Kahn determined his work at MIT to be a little stifling, and went to work at BBN Labs, turning his attention towards computer networking.
In September 1969 Kahn tested the first ARPANET nodes at UCLA. In 1972, the first International Computer Conference was held in Washington DC. Anyone who had anything to do with computer networking was active in these presentations. After the conference, Kahn realized he needed to move to Washington D.C., an option he had never really contemplated prior to the conference. Living in Boston at the time, he cast his ballot for president and got on an airplane, commencing the next phase of his life in the nation’s capital to work for DARPA.
At DARPA, Kahn went from working in networking to automated manufacturing. One month after he arrived, Congress wiped out the program. As a consequence, he set up a radio packet program, which incorporated multiple components, including what is now voice-over IP and end-to-end security. In addition, Kahn asked a young Vint Cerf, just out of UCLA’s PhD program to assist him with “this whole mission.” The growth of LANs was a big surprise. Kahn imagined the industry would have to operate with five or ten big nets, but instead found themselves in the middle of hundreds of thousands, and now millions of LANs. When Vint Cert joined the team at DARPA, Kahn was its director.
While working on a satellite packet network project, he formulated the initial ideas for what later became the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which was meant as a replacement for an older network protocol, NCP, utilized in the ARPANET. While working at this, he played a large role in shaping the foundation of open-architecture networking, used by today's Internet Providers, which would allow computers and networks around the world to communicate with each other, no matter what hardware or software the computers on each network employed.
Vinton Cerf
Vinton Cerf worked on many exciting networking projects at DARPA, including the Packet Radio Net (PRNET), and the Packet Satellite Network (SATNET). In the spring of 1973, he joined Robert Kahn as Principal Investigator on a project to plan the next generation networking protocol for the ARPANET. Kahn had experience with the Interface Message Processor, and Cerf had experience with the Network Control Protocol, making them the ideal team to create what became TCP/IP.
Vinton Gray "Vint" Cerf born June 23, 1943 in New Haven, Connecticut is an American computer scientist who is the "person most frequently called 'the father of the Internet'."
Growing up in Southern California, Dr. Cerf's first job after receiving his B.S. in Mathematics from Stanford University was at IBM, where he worked for fewer than two years as a systems engineer supporting QUIKTRAN. He departed IBM to go to graduate school at UCLA where he earned his master's degree in 1970 and his PhD in 1972. During his postgraduate years, he studied under Professor Gerald Estrin, did work in Professor Leonard Kleinrock's data packet networking group that connected the first two nodes of the ARPANet, the predecessor to the Internet, and "contributed to a host-to-host protocol" for the ARPANet. While at UCLA, he also ran across Robert E. Kahn, who was working on the ARPANet hardware architecture. After obtaining his doctorate, Cerf became an assistant professor at Stanford University from 1972-1976, where he carried on research on packet network interconnection protocols and co-designed the DoD TCP/IP protocol suite with Kahn.
Initially, in 1973, DARPA signed with Cerf to work with Kahn on facets of the emerging Internet project, to help finish the planning and implementation of the TCP (Transmission Control Protocol). The thought was to replace the Arpanet's by-then-outdated process of passing on messages, called the Network Control Protocol. Cerf and Kahn began by outlining a paper describing their network design, titled "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection", which they circulated at a special meeting of the INWG at Sussex University in September, 1973, and later finalized and published in the IEEE Transactions of Communications Technology, in May, 1974.
Kahn and Cerf configured powerful error and re-transmission capabilities into TCP to center on supplying exceedingly reliable communications. The design was later layered into two protocols, TCP/IP, where TCP manages high level services like re-transmission of lost packets, and IP deals with packet addressing and transmission.
Kahn has continue to foster the growth of the Internet over the years through guiding the standards process and associated activities, and is today President of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), a not-for-profit organization which does research in the public interest on strategic development of network-based information technologies. He accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom on November 9, 2005. Among other awards and honours, Kahn shared the Charles Stark Draper Prize in 2001 with Cerf, Leonard Kleinrock, and Lawrence Roberts for their influence on the ARPANET and Internet.
Cerf has also continued to do research and contribute to the evolution of the Internet through work with the communications company MCI and the Internet management organization ICANN. As vice president of MCI Digital Information Services from 1982-1986, Dr. Cerf led the engineering of MCI Mail, the first commercial email service to be connected to the Internet. Dr. Cerf has worked for Google as its Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist since September 2005. In this function he has become well-known for his predictions on how technology will impact future society, covering such fields as artificial intelligence, environmentalism, the coming of IPv6 and the transformation of the television industry and its delivery model.
Dr. Cerf currently serves on the board of advisors of Scientists and Engineers for America, an organization concentrated on advancing sound science in American government, and he is a leading contender to be selected the nation's first Chief Technology Officer by President Obama.