Oral History of Robert Kahn Interviewed by: Vinton Cerf Recorded: September 30, 2006 McLean, Virginia CHM Reference number: X3699.2007 © 2006 Computer History Museum Oral History of Robert Kahn Vinton (Vint) Cerf: It's 30 September 2006, and [I’m Vint] Cerf off camera, interviewing Robert E. Kahn on the occasion of the Computer History Museum Fellows Program. Bob will be inducted as a fellow later on in the year. This interview is for purposes of capturing his history in our Computer History Museum archives. The questions that I'm going to ask Bob initially are more or less a pro forma set of questions that we ask everyone, after which we will go into much more specific questions about Bob's history so the people who are interested will have some specifics. But let's start out, Bob, with some very simple straightforward things. Where did you grow up? Robert (Bob) Kahn: I was born in Brooklyn, New York, I'm told. Don't recall the exact moment but I recall the history. I lived in Brooklyn until I was about 13 years old. Cerf: Is there any reason to think that you weren't actually born in Brooklyn and you were only told that? Kahn: No, I think I was born in Brooklyn. Cerf: All right, fair enough. Kahn: There are some people who can remember, they claim, back then. I sort of remember my youth from about the age of six or seven, and I have sort of vague recollections of things before that. But we lived in Brooklyn until I was about 13 years old, lived in a rented house, in my recollection, on 19th Street in the part of Brooklyn that I guess would be considered Flatbush. Before that we lived on Ocean Parkway and a few other places that I don't recall at all. I'm just told. We moved to Flushing, Long Island in 1952 or 1953 -- 1952 I think -- and lived there until I went off to graduate school. Cerf: Well, we'll come back to that in due course. Can you tell us a little bit about what your father and your mother did? How were they employed, if they were, and what was that work? Kahn: My dad was a high school administrator during all the time I was growing up. When I ended up moving out he was principal or assistant principal at a high school in Brooklyn -- Tilden High School. He had started there back in the depression teaching accounting, which is what his college degree was in, and he rose up through the ranks. I think he was Dean of students and he had a few other administrative roles, but he was basically a high school administrator. One of the interesting things that he had done was he teamed up with another gentlemen in the New York area that lived around the corner from us who owned about a dozen nursing homes in the New York area. My dad used to do business advising during weekends to sort of supplement the income. Cerf: This is while he was still acting as a high school administrator? Kahn: Yes. His background was in accounting and he was really good at analyzing the economic efficiencies of businesses. So he would supplement his income, which was not that large in the school system but was steady income, I guess, which was important during the depression. He used to supplement that by consulting with different businesses. A bakery that was marginal, and he'd explain CHM Ref: X3699.2007 © 2006 Computer History Museum Page 2 of 82 Oral History of Robert Kahn how if you re-routed the trucks he could save money, deliver more bread. If you organized your accounting this way, if you made people consultants rather than employees, if you took out one plan versus another you could make it more efficient. He used to do that with some regularity. He teamed up with this gentleman, whose name was William Kellman, and my dad worked with him to set up a system to help him manage his nursing homes. He was having trouble even figuring out who his patients were, what supplies they had, provisioning for the future -- the sort of thing that you really need to do to stay on top of your business. He set up a paper forms system of managing nursing homes. They started to use it and it turned out to make a big difference. So, Bill Kellman, who was really the person who knew that business well, introduced that to some of his colleagues in Connecticut and New Jersey and Pennsylvania, some of the nearby states and it didn't take very long before they were in all 48 states of the United States. Of course later on it was all 50 states when Arizona and Hawaii came in late in the '50s. This was all in the late '40s, early '50 time frame that that happened. The company was called Macrobiotics, which was a name that didn't mean anything I believe back then. It later came to mean a significant amount, especially in the dietary regimes. Cerf: Sure. Kahn: But, it was a little business that they grew significantly. When Medicare came about in the early 1960s one of the things that they were in possession of was probably the most comprehensive list of nursing homes and names of administrators of those nursing homes, number of beds, and much of the information that the government wanted. They made that available to the government because they were the only ones that really had it. The government, of course, set up a system of requirements for reporting that applied to both hospitals and nursing homes. They were not in the hospital business. That was sort of a too big business. But the nursing home was a little niche business and they focused on that for their whole existence. It turned out to be a small but very profitable little business. I don't think they ever did more than $1 million worth of gross revenue, but the profitability was huge. My dad ran that business until the day he died. Cerf: That's amazing. Kahn: At age -- I think he was 89 or 90. He was still running it at that time. I've actually kept the business going. It's sort of a one-person business right now. It's really small but it's sort of like a government bond; it keeps producing a small percentage of revenue. Cerf: That's fascinating. Some things have a life of their own, don't they? What about your mother? Kahn: My mother was a very interesting woman, very interested in education, very socially minded. She was always trying to help folks. But in her 30s she had the first of what would have been, I guess, a total of eight heart attacks. Cerf: Good grief! CHM Ref: X3699.2007 © 2006 Computer History Museum Page 3 of 82 Oral History of Robert Kahn Kahn: She probably had rheumatic fever as a child, and it really came to pass. The last of those heart attacks was so bad that the doctors told her that she would not survive another one, and they were coming at a frequency of about one a year. So she ended up going in for closed heart surgery in 1953, shortly after we had moved to Flushing. Closed heart surgery is a very different kind of surgery than open heart surgery, because with the open heart surgery they can keep the blood circulating in the body and they have more time to do the operation. In closed heart surgery, which they had to do back then because they didn't have those machines, they literally had to shut down the blood supply. So they stopped the heart, they stopped the blood flow. In five minutes you're dead and, in fact, I think they said after 90 seconds you start to suffer … Cerf: Some side effects. Kahn: some lossage in the brain in certain functions. So they literally set a budget of, like, 90 seconds or maybe 60 seconds, to literally do the whole surgery. So they could get you prepared for it but by the time they go in and do the surgery… This was valve replacement. Or I guess in those days it wasn't replacement, it was [that] the mitral valve had closed due to scar tissue so they had to go in and cut out the scar tissue. Cerf: That's incredible they could do that in such a short amount of time. Kahn: I didn't actually see the operation but I'm told they did it with little Exacto knives, those little things the model airplane guys use to cut balsa wood. Little knives on the end of their finger. They'd sort of go in, do the surgery, and then they have to get it all cleaned out because even a small piece of detritus in that system can cause blockages and strokes and the like. Cerf: Sure. Kahn: The mortality rate, I am told, the week of that operation was 50 percent. Cerf: Good God! Kahn: You had a one chance in two of surviving the surgery that week, and that the mortality rate was 95 percent in five years. So, you didn't go through the surgery unless those were good odds relative to the alternatives. Cerf: There weren't many other choices. Kahn: So, she did and not only did she survive it, although the first five or ten years were really very difficult.