Bob Kahn on the Birth of “Inter-networking” A codeveloper of TCP/IP explains what led to his collaboration with Vint Cerf

IEEE Spectrum recently published a profile of Vint Cerf, who together with Bob Kahn developed what later became known as TCP/IP, the suite of protocols that power the Internet. That article didn’t detail the events leading up to their influential technical collaboration, though. So IEEE Spectrum talked with Kahn to learn this part of the story and his conception of open-architecture networking.

Maybe we could start at the beginning of your professional career after you got your Ph.D. You started at BBN [Bolt, Beranek, and Newman], right?

Bob Kahn: I got my Ph.D. from Princeton in 1964 and took a job as an assistant professor at MIT in the electrical engineering department. I was there for a few years. In late 1966, I took a leave of absence (which I thought would be only for a year or two) to get some practical experience. I went to BBN. I started working on networking and ended up not going back to academia.

1966 was at the start of the conception of the ARPANET [the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network], was it not?

Kahn: Close. When I started working on computer networking, I had heard of ARPA, but I had never worked with them. I didn’t know what they did. And I didn’t even know that they were interested in networking at the time. As far as I was concerned, computer networking was just an idea that I thought was really interesting, especially the communication-network aspects. But there had been other people who had been interested in computer networking well before that.