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Bob Kahn
By Ian SattlerPhoto By R. Teri Memolo
Imagine a life with no Internet. The thought wouldn’t have been such a big deal even 10 years ago, but today most of us couldn’t find a doctor or even the listings for a movie without the ‘Net. This technology that has become a virtual necessity of modern life is a direct result of the work of Dr. Robert E. Kahn. While conducting research in the late ‘60s during a leave of absence from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Kahn was responsible for the overall design of the ARPANET, the first packet-switched network. ARPANET, developed by the firm of Bolt, Beranek, and Newman for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), was the beginning of the infrastructure of information sharing that would lay the groundwork for the Internet.
What are your thoughts on how the Internet has developed? Are you surprised by where it’s gone, or has it met your expectations?
I don’t know that I had any expectations of how it would develop. When we started, we asked, Couldn’t we figure out how to get these machines to work together? The Internet was sort of the challenge of figuring out how to make them all work together even though they were all different. So it was really related to very different technical problems, and we saw it as a technical challenge. We were all very interested and excited about that because we all saw the potential for it, but I don’t know that there was any real expectation that it would lead to anything. Little by little, as the things developed, it was, “Oh, this really could happen.” So when the gaming thing clicked in the late ‘70s, and when the IBM PC came out, the first of the workstations, it started to sink in that this could become more of a mass medium and people could actually have their own personal machines and run them out of their homes, as well as their business, and the potential became larger.
I’m curious – is your magazine on the ‘Net?
We have a presence, as everybody does, but we believe firmly in the printed press. For us, it’s something that we all collectively, when we put the magazine together, thought a lot about. We really love publishing – physical, actual publishing.
Right. Try and tell people who are in the library business that books are passé, and you’ll have about as much luck as convincing the Navy they don’t need aircraft carriers.
Right, right. That’s true.
Books are the symbols of the intellectual contributions of the past and of the future. I love them. The [computer] network is another dissemination mechanism, and for much of the information in the world where there’s no need to keep it around in paper form, it’s a perfectly fine place. If we get to the point where it’s really economical to produce it in physical form on demand, there’d be no purpose of ever keeping it around—unless you just wanted to have a special artifact.