Robert Kahn (computer scientist)

Open-architecture networking. Kahn had helped design the ARPANET's routing computers at Bolt Beranek and Newman before moving to the defence research agency in 1972, where he faced joining radio, satellite and wired networks that worked in completely different ways. His answer was a common protocol over networks that stayed independent, and in 1974 he and Vint Cerf published the design that became TCP/IP.