While Director of Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) at DARPA, he initiated the United States government’s billion dollar Strategic Computing Program, the largest computer research and development program ever undertaken by the federal government. Dr. Kahn conceived the idea of open-architecture networking and coined the term National Information Infrastructure (NII) in the mid 1980s, which later became more widely known as the Information Super Highway.
In December 1997, President Bill Clinton presented the U.S. National Medal of Technology to Kahn and his colleague, Vinton Cerf, for founding and developing the Internet. In 2004, Kahn was the recipient of the ACM Alan M. Turing award (sometimes called the “Nobel Prize of Computer Science”) and in 2005 he was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George Bush.
