Unsung innovators: Robert Kahn, the 'stepfather' of the Internet

As Kahn points out, that could still change.

The two will go down in history as an inseparable team. In 2005, both won the coveted Turing Award, and both were awarded the National Medal of Technology by President Clinton in 1997 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bush in 2005.

Kahn finds it funny that, looking back, people think getting the funding for a program to do the Internet and making it happen was "a slam-dunk."

"I'll tell you, the only reason we succeeded in building it was that no one cared enough in the early 1970s to get involved and try to stop it," he says. "So few companies had time-sharing computers back then, and thus, there wasn't seen to be much of a market for interactive computer networks. And so there was no effort in the private sector to interconnect nonexistent networks to each other."

DARPA happened to have three such networks in existence or in development, Kahn says, "so we could imagine the problem and attempt to solve the interconnection problem. It was not until later that alternate networks, such as the Ethernet and personal computers, emerged in the commercial marketplace. That made a big difference."

One big moment that isn't often recognized, he says, is when DARPA -- working with a number of contractors, including Collins Radio, BBN and others -- demonstrated the first successful TCP connection traversing three dissimilar but interconnected networks. November 22, 2007, marked the 30th anniversary of that demo.

It was an event that Kahn believes should be more recognized because, like today's Internet, it was the "internetworking" of three disparate networks, and it foreshadowed the cellular and Wi-Fi systems of today.

Kahn and Cerf also teamed up to run the then-fledgling Internet Engineering Task Force, which originally was created to manage short-term items to "get the Internet up and running," and later took on responsibility for other Internet standards groups.

After his stint at DARPA, Kahn didn't stop pioneering. In 1986, he started the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI). The Reston, Va.-based organization helps shepherd various technology infrastructure projects. With funding from the National Science Foundation and DARPA, the CNRI helped create the first Gigabit networks operating at speeds above 1 billion bits per second. The CNRI also funded the development of Mosaic, the first popular Web browser, at the University of Illinois.

Among CNRI's other achievements is the technology around the digital object architecture, which, Kahn explains, "was an effort on my part to reinvent the Internet around the idea of managing digital objects instead of just moving bits around."

Of course, scores of people at DARPA and elsewhere also deserve credit for developing the Arpanet, which was the first packet-switched network and was one of the three original networks linked via the Internet, along with a satellite network and a radio network. But Kahn has been there from the very beginning and is still involved today.

	Unsung Innovators Jean Bartik, ENIAC computer programmer David Bradley, inventor of the 'three-fingered salute' Lynn Conway and Carver Mead, VLSI chip pioneers Marty Goetz, holder of the first software patent Andy Hertzfeld, original Macintosh OS designer Robert Kahn, the 'stepfather' of the Internet Ted Nelson, hypertext creator Brad Templeton, funny man on a 'dot-com' mission Gary Thuerk, father of spam Ray Tomlinson, who put the @ in e-mail addresses Second acts: Seven tech titans today

Read more about networking and internet in Computerworld's Networking and Internet Knowledge Center.