2018 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science presented to Vinton Cerf, Ph.D. and Robert Kahn, Ph.D.

From its very inception, all traffic on what we now know as the Internet has been conveyed using a suite of protocols collectively called Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). Remarkably, these protocols, designed in 1974 by Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn to allow individual computer networks to internetwork, have remained essentially unchanged since they were created. TCP/IP was originally adopted to provide the protocols of the newly emerging Internet in the early 1980s and has scaled without change to power the global Internet of today. The goal of TCP/IP was to create a single protocol that could power networks sitting on very different communications systems, from point-to-point computer connection, satellite-connected networks with very high latency, and mobile packet-switch networks with ever changing communications reliability. This effort succeeded remarkably.