WINTER 2002 T H E B E N T O F T A U B E T A P I 43

Founding Fatherby Raymond R. Bert, Massachusetts Alpha ’93

OBERT E. KAHN,New York Eta’60, has only onechild and anempty nest. His

child is now 30 or so, thoughits precise age is harder topin down than a DominicanLittle Leaguer’s. RobertKahn’s child, you see, is theInternet.

Now president andCEO of the Corporation forNational Research Initia-tives (CNRI), the not-for-profit firm he founded in1986, the 63-year-old Kahnis 15 years removed from hisdays at the U.S. DefenseAdvanced Research Pro-jects Agency (DARPA),where the Internet wasborn and steadfastly nur-tured for its first 20 years.

In fact, though, Kahnhad already begun layingthe groundwork for theInternet before coming toDARPA. As a communica-tions specialist at BoltBeranek and Newman(BBN), a consulting firm inCambridge, MA, he had become interested in networkingcomputers and helped that firm win the contract to buildthe ARPANET. “The Internet was an architecture to linktogether a number of different networks,” Kahn says. “Itstarted out as an R&D project to demonstrate the techni-cal capability for internetworking, and it eventually turnedinto something that I think none of us could have imag-ined when we started.”

Though he could easily lay claim to the Internet ideawithout hesitation, the understated Kahn is loath to claimall the credit, because he knows that there is plenty ofcredit to go around. As you might expect, official recogni-tion and designation of the Internet’s “founding fathers”is somewhat muddled. A rudimentary web search turnsup many names. The National Academy of Engineeringselected four people on whom to bestow the moniker whenthey presented the Charles Stark Draper prize in 2001 fortechnical contributions leading to the Internet. The NationalMedal of Technology, bestowed by President William J.

Clinton, honored only two ofthem. The most commonlycited, though, are Kahn andhis one-time colleagueVinton Cerf, with whomKahn co-authored the TCP/IP protocols that embodythe Internet architecture.

There have beenpeople who’ve had the ideaof computer networks goingback to the early 1960s.“With something as power-ful and successful as theInternet, allowing every-one who has contributed hisor her share of the credit ishealthy.”

You can sense thatKahn has been asked aboutthis subject many timessince the Internet boom be-gan in the mid-1990s, thathe’s looked at the questionfrom all the angles—histori-cal and technological, andthat he’s comfortable withhis own knowledge of theway things happened andthe role he played. You notethat he is treading care-fully—though not too care-

fully—in how he portrays this to others.The national academies, Kahn says, decided to pick

the people who made major contributions that led to theInternet. “I think they did the right thing,” he says. “It’slike Nixon and Kissinger on opening up China or Watsonand Crick on DNA. Teasing that kind of thing apart doesn’talways do any good. I was sitting in a position in Washing-ton that had major funding and programmatic responsi-bility, but I needed help from people in the private sectorto do the work.”

THE ROAD TO THEINFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY

The private sector is where Kahn himself first encounterednetworking—he was not a native of governmental agencies.And, given that the field of computer networking didn’texist in any real sense when he began his career, it seemsfair to ask how he ended up at the epicenter of it all.

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44 WINTER 2002 T H E B E N T O F TA U B E TA P I

Kahn attended the City College of New York, wherehe received the first of what was to be many honors—elec-tion to Tau Beta Pi. He graduated in 1960 with a bachelor’sdegree in electrical engineering. The recipient of a Na-tional Science Foundation fellowship, he spent four yearsat Princeton, earning his M.A. in electrical engineering in1962 and his Ph.D., also in electrical engineering, in 1964.

Soon after completing his Ph.D., he joined the facultyat MIT. But, at first, he felt a little out of place. “I felt sortof like the coach who’s never played the sport he’s coach-ing. The other faculty all had a certain amount of practicalexperience and savvy in real-world systems,” Kahn says.“So I took a leave of absence, figuring that I’d go get my-self involved in some practical engineering project, learnhow to do something real, and then go back to teaching.”

Kahn landed at Bolt Beranek and Newman in Cam-bridge, which at the time was an architectural acousticsfirm. “I was the first communications person they’d everhired,” he says. “And I got interestedin networking.” After a few months, hissupervisor mentioned that DARPA wasinterested in building a national com-puter network and that Kahn ought toshare with them some of the work he’dbeen doing.

“I had been writing memos on dif-ferent aspects of networking, such ashow to control the flow of trafficthrough networks, how to do buffermanagement, and things like that,” hesays. “DARPA eventually put out a callfor proposals to build them a net. Iwrote the technical part of the proposal,BBN won the bid, and we ended up get-ting the contract and building theArpanet.”

During the development and roll-out of the Arpanet, Kahn became soimmersed in the project that once it wasup and running in 1972, he moved toDARPA himself, eventually becomingdirector of its information processingtechnologies office. In that role, he ini-tiated the Strategic Computing Pro-gram, a billion-dollar effort that was inits time the largest computer research and developmentprogram ever undertaken by the federal government.

Asked if there were a specific moment when he be-came aware that his career had taken off in a direction hehadn’t foreseen, Kahn characteristically shuns a simple yesor no answer. “I like to do whitewater canoeing,” he says.“You jump into a raging rapid, and you don’t get out untilit calms down. My career has been sort of like a 30-yearseries of successive rapids—there was a recognition thatwe were on top of something pretty serious.”

HUMBLE ORIGINS

The original intent for the internetworking project was notto provide a way to link computers in every home andbusiness around the world. Indeed, the concept of a“personal computer” was still almost a decade away. In theearly 1970s, internetworking was just a research project,

an attempt to show that you could communicate amongdifferent computers on multiple networks seamlessly. “Atthe time, none of us thought that this was likely to be ofpractical use outside the defense or research community,”Kahn says. “We thought there might be perhaps a fewhundred organizations that could make use of this capability,that there might be half a dozen to a dozen large-scalenetworks to interconnect someday.”

With that in mind, Kahn and his colleague Vint Cerfdeveloped an addressing system—involving what areknown as IP addresses—to identify each computer con-nected to the combined “network of networks” that is nowthe Internet. They allotted 8 bits of the address to iden-tify the network, giving them the ability to specify 256different networks. “Since we were only expecting at mostperhaps a dozen large-scale networks, that was overkill,”Kahn says. But when the Ethernet was invented in themid-1970s, suddenly there was a demand to identify local

area networks (LANs) as well. TheInternet proceeded to spread into theresearch and education areas, and itwasn’t long before the original 8-bitnetwork field, nets, “became one ofthose predictions like Bill Gates’ 64Kof memory ought to be enough for any-one,” Kahn says with a smile.

“The most surprising thing [thathappened during the Internetexplosion] was when InfoWorldmagazine [staff] notified us that theywere making us custodians of theirproduct-of-the-year award,” Kahn says.“They gave the award to the Internet,when we thought we had done the work20 years before. But that was the firsttime it was visible to them.”

And similarly, “I remember the firsttime I saw NBC news saying ‘email usyour comments (at nightly@ nbc.com, ifI recall correctly).’ And I thought, ‘Thereit is!—the Internet/Arpanet stuff on theTV screen. It made the big time.’ ”

And just as the touchstones for theInternet’s having “arrived” weredifferent for Kahn than for the general

public, so too were the keystone events. Although theInternet began as a research project, by the late 1990s itwas largely commercial. So, what was the first commercialapplication on the Net? No, it’s got nothing to do with AOLor Amazon.com; it was hooking up the MCI-mail system tothe Internet in 1989, a job carried out by his firm CNRI.Vint Cerf had previously designed the MCI-mail systemwhile an employee in the mid 1980s, and it was perhapsinevitable that CNRI would undertake this ground-breaking effort after Kahn convinced Cerf to join him atCNRI in 1986. It was also during that timeframe that Kahnsaw the dominoes lining up that could make the Internetthe economic and cultural force it is today: the NationalScience Foundation creating a higher speed backbone,known as NSFNET, that eventually superseded theARPANET and enabled the entire research and educationalcommunity to get connected; multiple administrations andthe Congress providing continuing federal support fornetwork connectivity; a Virginia congressman in the early

I stillthink thatelectronic

mail is andwas the killerapplicationfor all the

networking,for mostpeople.

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WINTER 2002 T H E B E N T O F T A U B E T A P I 45

1990s pushing a bill through the House that allowed NSFto open up its NSFNET to commercial use; and the WorldWide Web and point-and-click browsers coming along inthe mid-1990s.

Kahn seems genuinely bemused at the way his re-search project from 30 years before has played out andinfiltrated people’s lives. “I still think that electronic mailis and was the killer application for most people,” he says.“But that wasn’t our goal in doing it. Our goal was for com-puters to talk to computers, not for people to talk to people.And now most people use the Net for email and to surf theWeb.” He shrugs, as if to say, “Who would have guessedthose applications would dominate today?”

And just as his excitement about the boom is some-what muted, so too is his regret about the bust that fol-lowed. The crash “got a lot of people out of buying lotterytickets,” he says matter-of-factly. “That’s what was hap-pening with the valuation run-ups that had no correlationto the basic, underlying business mod-els of the companies. They were sellingeyeballs; kids were running businessesout of their bedrooms—there was a sortof hysteria out there. With every newdot.com, people would invest becausethey never knew which would be nextto take off.”

NEXT UP FOR THE NET

And what of the Internet in the longterm? What’s on the horizon?

Kahn has plenty of thoughts onwhere things may be heading. “Onceyou get enough bandwidth—mostly aneconomic issue—then you can sendhigh-quality video around, and people’sperceptions of the Internet will changeagain,” he says. “It’s something of adouble-edged sword; more informationmeans you’re not as limited in what youcan hear about from other places. Butthe fact of the matter is that you canhave a glut of information, [and] onething that is unchangeable is the 24hours in each day.”

There are other developments that Kahn sees havingmajor impacts, as well. “Language translation softwarecan make the world look a lot smaller—the way the jetplane did,” he says. “But beyond that, who can tell? Youcan imagine everything being hooked up to the Net, tell-ing your robotic assistant to start up whatever … but that’smostly dependent on economics and what people want,rather than just what is possible.”

One of the areas that Kahn sees growing in importanceis something that he’s been hard at work on for more than adecade. “I think we’re going to see a lot more informationmanagement on the Net,” he says. “I think that’s one of thesleeper areas. People today don’t really think of using theNet as a way to manage their own information but as a wayto access somebody else’s. People will need to think verycarefully about backing up their information and providingadequate levels of security and availability. Having it onthe Net in places, accessible from multiple places with se-curity, is becoming a key objective for many organizations.”

Kahn sees corporations thinking about making theiractive information as well as their archives available inthis way—though obviously with tightly controlled access.Network-based information management will become in-creasingly important over time. And that’s where Kahn’slatest work on digital object architecture enters.

“With the Internet we didn’t say how you should de-sign your networks, where they should be built, who shouldrun them, or what applications should run on them,” hesays. “We were purposely silent about a lot of the thingsthat were super-important about what you would do withthe architecture that we created.” Digital object architec-ture has many of the same attributes. Kahn and CNRIaren’t trying to tell people how they should manage theirinformation—they’re simply saying that you’d better doso in a methodical, logical way. “My work is focused on there-conceptualization of the Internet to deal with informa-tion as a fundamental commodity,” Kahn says. “This is im-

portant because almost everything inthe real world has some notion of own-ership, but the Internet was never cre-ated with that in mind. We have pack-ets moving across the network, butthere’s fundamentally no way to tellwhat’s what and who’s who.”

Kahn asserts that anyone who getssomething today via the Internet—whether that “object” is a piece of mu-sic, a database, or simply some text—generally speaking, has no clear ideawhat can or cannot be done with thatmaterial. And as always, he’s not inter-ested in telling people how to do things,but in giving them the structurewhereby they can do things the waythey choose. “I’m not one that’s gottendeep into the issue of enforcement,” hesays. “My view is more reminiscent ofspeed limits on a highway. As a creatorof intellectual property, I would wantpeople to know what my requirementsand/or expectations are—what’s al-lowed and not allowed. Would you wantto drive on a highway system where ifyou went 56 miles an hour, one mile over

the posted speed limit, a giant magnet came out of the sky,grabbed your car, and smelted it? I don’t think so.”

Among other things, Kahn feels that the intellectual-property community ought to be concerned with protect-ing copyrighted work or important information from beingchanged or used without appropriate attributions to thesource. Commercial interests will obviously be interestedin protecting revenue streams. “But that doesn’t necessar-ily translate one-to-one into locking everything down,” hesays. As an example, he cites the early experience of thesoftware industry, which took a while to realize that thereal business was in upgrades and that people sharing theirsoftware was simply good advertising for their product. Wemay need to develop new business models here.

“It’s all about defining expectations,” he says. “If youdrive on this road, you’re expected to drive at least 40 butno more than 55. If you step into a boxing ring, beat theother guy up, but don’t kill him. But if you download a file,can you share it or not? Today, nobody knows.”

Theintellectual

propertycommunityought to be

concerned withprotecting

copyrighted work . . .and

protectingrevenue streams.

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HONOR ROLL

Here’s one thing we do know: Robert Kahn is one of themost highly decorated Internet soldiers anywhere. The listof his awards and honorary degrees is so long that—withno explanations, only the name of each honor—it takes upa quarter of his official bio page.

Outside a conference room at his firm, Kahn passes arow of shelves brimming with plaques, trophies, and otherspoils. And here again, he displays the same mix of prideand detachment as when he spoke of his status in Internethistory: the public nature of the display shows that theawards are meaningful to him, yet he clearly doesn’t ob-sess over them—he has to lift each one and read it to re-member who it’s from and what it’s for.

He will, however, single out a number of awards asmajor acknowledgments of his work: the Marconi Interna-tional Fellowship Foundation “for the ARPANET and itssuccessor, the Internet”; the National Medal of Technology,the nation’s highest honor for technical innovation, whichhe shared with friend Vint Cerf of MCI for their work indeveloping Internet protocols; the Alexander Graham Bellmedal from the IEEE; and the Charles Stark Draper prizefrom the National Academy of Engineering for technicalcontributions leading to the Internet.

And it isn’t just award committees, but also colleagueswho sing his praises. Dr. Robert W. Lucky, Indiana Alpha’57, corporate vice president of applied research at TelcordiaTechnologies, who has known Kahn for more than four de-cades—they first met when Kahn was a student workingsummers at Bell Labs—says that Kahn’s work “shows a lotof beauty and brilliance. He’s a modest, thoughtful, prin-cipled person. Someone that you’re proud to know.”

When Kahn left DARPA after serving 13 years at theagency, he told Lucky that he wanted to start a “privateDARPA,” which became CNRI. Lucky’s first thought was,“What a daring thing to do! But Bob is always looking forways to champion a national cause.”

Kahn himself says, more simply, that he serves in vari-ous capacities—such as with the National Academy of En-gineering or the U.S. Government—“to try to be helpful.”CNRI itself, as a not-for-profit corporation, is dedicated toresearch and funding that will help foster the developmentof information infrastructure. Recently, Kahn has been serv-ing on the President’s Information Technology AdvisoryCommittee, created several years ago. In the last year, Kahnhas become co-chair of a new panel on national securitywithin that committee, which has taken on added signifi-cance since September 11.

GOING DOWN IN HISTORY

Kahn’s life isn’t all work, though. He played varsity golf incollege and still plays when he can, though “not nearlyenough to be any good anymore,” he says. And add skiingtrips with his wife to his list of favorite pastimes, “althoughif one of us breaks a limb, we take a hiatus for a while,” hesays with a chuckle. Kahn also did a lot of figure skatingand squash playing , both during his college years and after.

Kahn married late in life, in his 40s, while his wife—an intellectual property lawyer—was in her late 30s. Kahnseems utterly content with his life and with his continuinginvolvement with the Internet and its evolution. Asked if

the time were right to pen a book on the genesis of theInternet, Kahn says, “I might in time, but it’s still playingout. The last 10 years puts a totally different spin on it. Itwould be like writing the story of radio in 1917, when ev-eryone had crystal sets and there were only a handful oftransmitters in the country. The story hasn’t played itselfout yet.”

“If you look at the history of the United States fromthe perspective of 200 years or so, there were a bunch ofguys—Jefferson, Washington, Adams, Franklin, Madi-son—who were all part of that incubation period when thecountry was formed. The Internet has some of the samedimensions. We did the early technical work on linkingnetworks in the 1970s, following the ARPANET effort thatbegan in the 1960s. The world first discovered the Internetbig time in the 1990s. So viewed from a greater distance,networking happened in a big way between the mid-1960sand the mid-1980s, and there were a lot of people who werea part of that.”

Many people may have had a hand in creating theInternet, but you can be sure that when the history booksare finally written, Kahn will be remembered as one ofthe most important founding fathers of cyberspace.

Raymond R. Bert, MassachusettsAlpha ’93, is a freelance writer inGermantown, MD.Ray received dual degrees in mechanicalengineering and English from WorcesterPolytechnic Institute in1993. He workedas a process-development engineer forHowmet Advanced Refurbishmentduring 1995–97 in North Haven, CT;as assistant editor of the ASCE’s CivilEngineering magazine during 1997–98;and as associate editor and senioreditor of ASEE’s Prism magazineduring1999–01.

He won the APEX ’99 award ofexcellence in feature writing for“Around the World in 24 Hours”(Prism, March 1999).

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