The 2023-24 season has wrapped up, and there are still quite a number of sci fi and fantasy television shows waiting to hear if they will stick around for another year. I expected more cancellations than usual this year, and we haven’t quite seen that yet, but that could change depending on how many of these shows end up getting sent to the Network Executioner. So far, 21 genre entries were cancelled or ended in this past season (27% of shows tracked) while 34 have been renewed so far (44%). You can see the full rundown of shows with all of their statuses at our Cancellation Watch Page, and below I look at the ones that have not received either a cancellation or renewal announcement yet.

The shows that I have flagged as On the Bubble can certainly use a Call to Action from fans on the social networks. And pretty much every show that has not been renewed yet could benefit from any form of fan support. We have seen genre entries like The Expanse, Lucifer, and Manifest saved by fan campaigns in the past, and perhaps one of the shows below could be the next to get an extended lease on life. Be sure to follow this site and our Twitter and Mastodon accounts for updates and breaking news on these shows as well as the genre entries for the 2024-25 season.

See all the upcoming sci fi and fantasy TV premieres at this link and keep up with the weekly schedule at this link.

The Acolyte (Disney+, Renewal Possible): This live-action Star Wars entry is not quite a Bubble show yet, but pretty close. Showrunner Leslye Headland has plans for more seasons of this show, but there have been rumors that Disney+ is not planning on continuing it beyond its first year, largely because it is so expensive to produce. It did make an appearance in the Nielsen Streaming Rankings, though, so maybe that will help its chances.

The Ark (Syfy, Renewal Possible): The second season of this space opera has just started, and Nielsen ratings data for the cable channels is sparse these days, so it is hard to make a call on this one at this point. Syfy has been bad about promoting its originals, and reviews have been mixed on the show, so I would not count it as a strong genre entry at this point. But perhaps it will do well enough to journey into a third season.

Ark: The Animated Series (Paramount+, On the Bubble): This animated entry released the first six episodes of its first season with no advance notice in March 2024, with the remaining seven set to be released later in the year.  It was originally supposed to premiere in 2023, but the show got shuffled around and Paramount+ does not appear to be giving it much promotion.  This is a co-licensed production with Studio Wildcard and Tiger Animation, and it may end up getting only the one season from the streaming service, though it could get shopped around to other venues.

Beacon 23 (MGM+, On the Bubble): This show had originally been a joint production by AMC and Spectrum and had been picked up for two seasons according to an interview with executive producer Glen Mazzara. It shifted over to MGM+ when AMC and Spectrum backed out, and there are plans for additional seasons. It is unclear if that network has an interest in keeping the show going, though, or if they just picked it up for a burn-off run.

Cult-SciFi.com: Looking Back at Cult Movies, TV Shows, Books, and More from the Worlds of Sci Fi, Fantasy, and Horror

The Changeling (Apple TV+, On the Bubble): This horror series did not develop too much buzz in its first season, but its creative team has a two-season plan in place that will wrap up all of its storylines. Showrunner Kelly Marcel says that “season one was a setup of a lot of questions, and season two is the answer to all of those questions”. However, there has been no word on that second season yet, and with Apple TV+ looking to cut back on spending for its original content, this show’s fate could be very much in doubt.

Chucky (Syfy/USA, Renewal Possible): There has been no word on a fourth season of this horror/comedy yet, but creator Don Mancini has already made a pitch to Syfy for where the show can go next. In addition, fans have an opportunity to support the show by calling 1-201-500-3347 to demand more adventures from Chucky. Its linear viewing numbers dropped off in its third year, but perhaps this one could stick around for another season (maybe becoming a USA exclusive like Resident Alien) if the fans lobby for it.

Creepshow (Shudder, Renewal Possible): This horror anthology has proven quite popular for the Shudder streaming service, setting viewership records and also receiving good buzz from critics and fans (plus, it has done well in its encore runs on AMC). There has been no word on a fifth season yet, but I am guessing that this one is not done yet.

Dark Matter (Apple TV+, Renewal Possible): This sci fi entry has not made it into the Nielsen Streaming Rankings so far, though it currently has mostly positive feedback, holding an 81% Fresh Rating and 82% Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes. Series creator Blake Crouch has indicated that he has ideas for a second season in an AMA he did on Reddit, though he has also suggested that the first season told the full story that he had planned. With Apple TV+ looking to cut back on spending for its original content, it is unclear where this one stands, but it could stick around for another season.

For status updates on the current sci fi and fantasy shows along with breaking news on cancellations and renewals, follow our Cancellation Watch posts.

Dead Boy Detectives (Netflix, Renewal Possible): This series spent three weeks in the Netflix Top 10 and two weeks in the Nielsen Streaming Rankings, though that may not be enough to satisfy the completion rate that Netflix execs are looking for. It is tied to the same universe as The Sandman, and perhaps that connection will keep it going, but the streamer is known for cutting bait on shows it does not believe are performing up to its viewing standards.

Hit Monkey (Hulu, On the Bubble): This animated entry is the last surviving show from the Marvel Television days before Marvel Studios took over production on all of the TV entries. It did not make it into the Nielsen Streaming Rankings in its second season and it has received very little buzz so far. There are plans for a third season, but my confidence is not high that it will go forward.

Orphan Black: Echoes (AMC, Renewal Possible): This Orphan Black spin-off has not drawn much of an audience so far based on the linear ratings and it has received mixed reviews. But AMC continues to advertise it pretty strongly, so perhaps they want to keep this franchise going. It may be performing better in digital viewing (I have not seen any numbers for that), and that may help get it to a second season.

Pluto (Netflix, On the Bubble): This animated series did not place in the Netflix Top 10 during its first-season run, and it adapted the full Manga across its eight episodes. If there is no word on it over the next month or so, I will consider it ended.

Sanctuary: A Witch’s Tale (AMC+, Renewal Possible): This supernatural drama arrived without much advance notice, though it did get a fair amount of promotion from AMC once it started streaming. No viewership numbers are available, and it did not develop much buzz during its first season run. But it is likely not too expensive to produce and there is still a chance that it could return for a second season.

For the weekly schedule of sci fi and fantasy shows along with news and the latest trailers, follow our Sci Fi TV Highlights posts.

Scott Pilgrim Takes Off (Netflix, On the Bubble): This animated continuation of the feature film made it into the Netflix Top 10 the week after its premiere, but according to creators Bryan Lee O’Malley and BenDavid Grabinski, they consider the first season to be one-and-done and currently have no ideas for a second year of the show. They have not completely ruled out a continuation, but if there is no word on it in the next month or so I will consider it ended.

Strange Planet (Apple TV+, On the Bubble): This animated series based on the webcomic of the same name came and went with very little fanfare and did not make any noise in the streaming charts. It has been a year since it premiered with no word on its fate, so likely this is one-and-done, especially considering that Apple TV+ is cutting back on spending for its original content.

Sugar (Apple TV+, Renewal Possible): This mystery series with sci fi elements developed some good buzz during its first season run, and from what I understand it performed well compared to other originals on Apple TV+. There has been no word on a second season yet, and Apple TV+ is cutting back on spending for its original content, but perhaps it could stick around for another year.

Sunny (Apple TV+, Renewal Possible): This sci fi dramedy arrived with very little fanfare and has not developed much buzz so far. It is still releasing episodes from its first season, and Apple TV+ may not have made a decision about its fate yet. But that streamer is cutting back on spending for its original content, so it is unclear whether a second season is a possibility for this show.

Keep up with sci fi TV news, updates, trailers and discussions at r/SciFiTV.

The Swarm (CW, Renewal Possible): This German-made series is an acquisition by The CW and its viewership in the U.S. will likely have little impact on whether it gets renewed. It is an expensive show to produce, but it did perform well in its home country during its first season run and a second season is possible. But if there is no word on that in the next month or so, I will consider it ended.

Them (Prime Video, Renewal Possible): The second season of this show made a brief appearance in the Nielsen Streaming Rankings and showrunner Little Marvin has indicated that he has plans for a third season. There has been no word on that yet, but this one could stick around for another year or so.

Time Bandits (Apple TV+, Renewal Possible): This reboot of the 1981 Terry Gilliam film is another new entry from Apple TV+ that did not receive much promotion before its premiere. The early reviews have been mixed on this one and no viewership numbers are available, so it is hard to make a call at this point. Apple TV+ is cutting back on spending for its original content, and this looks like a costly production, so if the viewership is not there it could end up as another one-and-done genre entry from that service.

Velma (Max, On the Bubble): People were surprised that this show received a second season after the first was pretty widely panned, but apparently that had been planned in advance. It did not make it into the Nielsen Streaming Rankings across its two seasons, and it currently holds only 38% on the Tomatometer scale and a 10% Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes. A third season seems unlikely at this point, especially as Max is cutting back on its original content.

Wolf Like Me (Peacock, Renewal Possible): This Australian-made supernatural dramedy has received very little attention for its run in the States on Peacock. But it is relatively inexpensive to produce and could stick around for another season or so, especially since it has an international partnership propping it up.

Be sure to follow the Cancelled Sci Fi Twitter Site  for breaking news and updates. And for the latest news and discussions on sci fi and fantasy television, follow r/SciFiTV

Follow our Sci Fi TV Schedule for all the currently airing and upcoming sci fi and fantasy television shows, and you can see the premieres for all the upcoming genre entries at this link.

The post Bubble Sci Fi TV: A Look at the Shows from the 2023-24 Season Still Awaiting Word on Their Fates appeared first on Cancelled Sci Fi.

Wild Planet is an open world survival adventure where you use ingenuity and teamwork to survive on an untamed alien planet.

Playable in single-player or co-op, Wild Planet will see you exploring a vast alien planet made up of dinose biomes. You’ll hunt alien bugs, gather resources, craft equipment, build bases and delve into ancient dungeons filled with danger and riches.

It’s got a great … Read More

What I want to achieve

I want to generate sphere planet world, seamless of course, for RTS game like Planetary Annihilation: TITANS, which means I want:

• place walking agents on sphere, move them on a sphere surface, be able to do A* pathfinding
• generate polygonal regions on sphere like Voronoi
• have world divided by chunks (possibly reduced to 1D array) to effectively perform calculations like local avoidance.
• generate seamless surface heightmap based on noise functions AND not to store this height map as a texture but just store height overrides in chunks. This way I can have just uint seed and overrides instead of keeping huge heightmap texture.

How would I do it in seamless 2D world

In 2D space things are really simple even if your world one axis seamless: 2D map can be imagined as cylinder, or both axis are seamless: 2D map can be imagined as torus.

Coordinates

They are just float x, y. Moving is just adjusting coordinates. Distance between 2 points is just distance between 2D vectors. Seamlessness of moving is achieved by % operation with coordinates, like x = x % x_max.

World as 2D grid

2D world can be represented as 2D grid where each cell is a chunk with which I can effectively store and access data, because 2D grid is reduced to 1D array. 2D position can be easily converted to chunk index and back.

Heightmap noise generation

Seamless noise can be tricky, but here we have golden treasure of map noise generation from red blob games.

Presenting world and LOD

I would use simple plane mesh with rectangular connection of triangles to represent terrain of 2D world. LOD then could be implemented by recursively add vertices into mesh cells like tree. Again with 2D world it is simple because mesh / data / LOD are all grid based.

Problems of doing same with sphere world

Because claimed / x-seamless / xy-seamless 2D worlds are all not really the sphere (they are plane / cylinder / torus in terms of wrapping) there can't be 1:1 transformation between 2D and spherical 2D world.

When trying to wrap rectangular around sphere something should be disturbed. It could be that we actually run all logic in 2D but project coordinates on sphere, but we will get disturbed positions near poles.

Or we can run logic on sphere and project positions back to 2D then we will get disturbed 2D representation like what happens with earth map when it represented in 2D, which is what called Equirectangular projection.

One way or another I need some "grid" representation of chunks, because in the end I need to test what chunks of sphere camera see and effectively cull objects which are not in visible chunk.

Cubemap solution

Representing sphere as cubemap kills all problems working with sphere, because sphere now represented as 6 2D grids.

• Constructing mesh is just get cube (or six plane faces) with vertices adjusted in a way they lay on unit sphere. LOD is now also possible because we can work with faces separately.
• Store and access needed chunk now isn't a problem also because now we are back on 2D grids.

Problem with cubemap coordinate system

Many thanks again to red blob games and this article in particular. Here we can find a way to implement coordinate system for cubemap world. But moving across faces is a huge mess, not only because it require to map direction for each face but also because when both x and y have to be wrapped to another face it becomes ambiguous which face to choose. So moving on cube map becomes problematic for corner cases.

Use cubemap only for data

I think it is possible to use spherical coordinate system latitude and longitude and reimplement common operations like moving, getting distance, etc. but on sphere instead of 2D surface and use cubemap representation only for storing data in and read from chunks.

Where to live finally?

• Living on sphere means to deal with spherical calculations which are more complex to understand and expensive because require trigonometrical functions. But then coordinate system becomes natural because we actually live on sphere and just map it on cubemap when need to work with rectangular chunks.
• Living on cubemap means to deal with cubemap coordinate system which is complex core of all this approach also producing prohibited moving cases. But in return we get nice and simple 2D calculations for everything with natural storing data in rectangular chunks and only use sphere to represent our world in 3D as a planet.

What I want as an answer

Maybe I already answered my question and there is no place to answer anymore and I just need to chose one way or another comparing pros and cons. But maybe I miss something, maybe there is another smart way to do what I need without overcomplicating everything. I will appreciate any advice.

Many moons ago, Microsoft once had its eye on the Sony-published LittleBigPlanet series.

Speaking with MinnMax, Mark Healey - who co-founded LittleBigPlanet developer Media Molecule back in 2006 - revealed that during the early stages of the game, the Xbox maker was "on the prowl" and was "kind of trying to steal" the studio from going with Sony.

"The funny thing is, we actually didn't have anything in writing to say that we were actually going to continue with [Sony] or that they even owned what we were doing, is my memory of it," Healey said of LittleBigPlanet, before sharing more on Microsoft's poaching efforts.

Read more

Many moons ago, Microsoft once had its eye on the Sony-published LittleBigPlanet series.

Speaking with MinnMax, Mark Healey - who co-founded LittleBigPlanet developer Media Molecule back in 2006 - revealed that during the early stages of the game, the Xbox maker was "on the prowl" and was "kind of trying to steal" the studio from going with Sony.

"The funny thing is, we actually didn't have anything in writing to say that we were actually going to continue with [Sony] or that they even owned what we were doing, is my memory of it," Healey said of LittleBigPlanet, before sharing more on Microsoft's poaching efforts.

Read more

Many moons ago, Microsoft once had its eye on the Sony-published LittleBigPlanet series.

Speaking with MinnMax, Mark Healey - who co-founded LittleBigPlanet developer Media Molecule back in 2006 - revealed that during the early stages of the game, the Xbox maker was "on the prowl" and was "kind of trying to steal" the studio from going with Sony.

"The funny thing is, we actually didn't have anything in writing to say that we were actually going to continue with [Sony] or that they even owned what we were doing, is my memory of it," Healey said of LittleBigPlanet, before sharing more on Microsoft's poaching efforts.

Read more

Sony has indefinitely decommissioned the PlayStation 4 servers for puzzle platformer LittleBigPlanet 3, the company announced in an update to one of its support pages. The permanent shutdown comes just months after the servers were temporarily taken offline due to ongoing issues. Fans now fear potentially hundreds of…

Read more...

This next sentence might make you feel very old and I’m sorry: Earlier this week, Cartoon Network’s first original show, Space Ghost Coast To Coast, turned 30 years old. And while many have spent the week celebrating the strange series, its best bits, and funniest episodes, I want to take a moment to remember a…

Read more...

In the mid-1960s, Robert Kahn began thinking about how computers with different operating systems could talk to each other across a network. He didn’t think much about what they would say to one another, though. He was a theoretical guy, on leave from the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a stint at the nearby research-and-development company Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN). He simply found the problem interesting.

“The advice I was given was that it would be a bad thing to work on. They would say it wasn’t going to lead to anything,” Kahn recalls. “But I was a little headstrong at the time, and I just wanted to work on it.”

Robert E. Kahn

Current job:

Chairman, CEO, and president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI)

Date of birth:

23 December 1938

Birthplace:

Brooklyn, New York

Family:

Patrice Ann Lyons, his wife

Education:

BEE 1960, City College of New York; M.A. 1962 and Ph.D. 1964, Princeton University

First job:

Runner for a Wall Street brokerage firm

First electronics job:

Bell Telephone Laboratories, New York City

Biggest surprise in career:

Leaving—and then staying out of—academics

Patents:

Several, including two related to the digital-object architecture and two on remote pointing devices

Heroes:

His parents, his wife, Egon Brenner, Irwin Jacobs, Jack Wozencraft

Favorite books:

March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (1984) by Barbara W. Tuchman, The Two-Ocean War: A Short History of the United States Navy in the Second World War (1963) by Samuel Eliot Morison

Favorite movies:

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Casablanca (1942)

Favorite kind of music:

Opera, operatic musicals

Favorite TV shows:

Golf, tennis, football, soccer—basically any sports show

Favorite food:

Chinese that he cooks himself, as taught to him by Franklin Kuo, codeveloper of ALOHAnet at the University of Hawaii

Favorite restaurants:

Le Bernardin, New York City, and L’Auberge Chez Francois, Great Falls, Va.

Leisure activities past and present:

Skiing, whitewater canoeing, tennis, golf, cooking

Key organizational memberships:

IEEE, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the U.S. National Academies of Science and Engineering, the Marconi Society

Major awards:

IEEE Medal of Honor “for pioneering technical and leadership contributions in packet communication technologies and foundations of the Internet,” the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, the Japan Prize, the Prince of Asturias Award

Kahn ended up “working on it” for the next half century. And he is still involved in networking research today.

It is for this work on packet communication technologies—as part of the project that became the ARPANET and in the foundations of the Internet—that Kahn is being awarded the 2024 IEEE Medal of Honor.

The ARPANET Is Born

Kahn wasn’t the only one thinking about connecting disparate computers in the 1960s. In 1965, Larry Roberts, then at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, connected one computer in Massachusetts to another in California over a telephone line. Bob Taylor, then at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), got interested in connecting computers, in part to save the organization money by getting the expensive computers it funded at universities and research organizations to share their resources over a packet-switched network. This method of communications involves cutting up data files into blocks and reassembling them at their destination. It allows each fragment to take a variety of paths across a network and helps mitigate any loss of data, because individual packets can easily be resent.

Taylor’s project—the ARPANET—would be far more than theoretical. It would ultimately produce the world’s first operational packet network linking distributed interactive computers.

Meanwhile, over at BBN, Kahn intended to spend a couple of years in industry so he could return to academia with some real-world experience and ideas for future research.

“I wasn’t hired to do anything in particular,” Kahn says. “They were just accumulating people who they thought could contribute. But I had come from the conceptual side of the world. The people at BBN viewed me as other.”

Kahn didn’t know much about computers at the time—his Ph.D. thesis involved signal processing. But he did know something about communication networks. After earning a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from City College of New York in 1960, Kahn had joined Bell Telephone Laboratories, working at its headquarters in Manhattan, where he helped to analyze the overall architecture and performance of the Bell telephone system. That involved conceptualizing what the network needed to do, developing overall plans, and handling the mathematical calculations related to the architecture as implemented, Kahn recalls.

“We would figure out things like: Do we need more lines between Denver and Chicago?” he says.

Kahn stayed at Bell Labs for about nine months; to his surprise, a graduate fellowship came through that he decided to accept. He was off to Princeton University in the autumn of 1961, returning to Bell Labs for the next few summers.

So, when Kahn was at BBN a few years later, he knew enough to realize that you wouldn’t want to use the telephone network as the basis of a computer network: Dial-up connections took 10 or 20 seconds to go through, the bandwidth was low, the error rate was high, and you could connect to only one machine at a time.

Other than generally thinking that it would be nice if computers could talk to one another, Kahn didn’t give much thought to applications.

“If you were engineering the Bell System,” he says, “you weren’t trying to figure out who in San Francisco is going to say what to whom in New York. You were just trying to figure out how to enable conversations.”

Bob Kahn graduated from high school in 1955.Bob Kahn

Kahn wrote a series of reports laying out how he thought a network of computers could be implemented. They landed on the desk of Jerry Elkind, a BBN vice president who later joined Xerox PARC. And Elkind told Kahn about ARPA’s interest in computer networking.

“I didn’t really know what ARPA was, other than I had seen the name,” Kahn says. Elkind told him to send his reports to Larry Roberts, the recently hired program manager for ARPA’s networking project.

“The next thing I know,” Kahn says, “there’s an RFQ [request for quotation] from ARPA for building a four-node net.” Kahn, still the consummate academic, hadn’t thought he’d have to do much beyond putting his thoughts down on paper. “It never dawned on me that I’d actually get involved in building it,” he says.

Kahn handled the technical portion of BBN’s proposal, and ARPA awarded BBN the four-node-network contract in January of 1969. The nodes rolled out later that year: at UCLA in September; the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in October; the University of California, Santa Barbara, in November; and the University of Utah in December.

Kahn postponed his planned return to MIT and continued to work on expanding this network. In October 1972, the ARPANET was publicly unveiled at the first meeting of the International Conference on Computer Communications, in Washington, D.C.

“I was pretty sure it would work,” Kahn says, “but it was a big event. There were 30 or 40 nodes on the ARPANET at the time. We put 40 different kinds of terminals in the [Washington Hilton] ballroom, and people could walk around and try this terminal, that terminal, which might connect to MIT, and so forth. You could use Doug Engelbart’s NLS [oN-Line System] at SRI and manipulate a document, or you could go onto a BBN computer that demonstrated air-traffic control, showing an airplane leaving one airport, which happened to be on a computer in one place, and landing at another airport, which happened to be on a computer in another place.”

The demos, he recalled, ran 24 hours a day for nearly a week. The reaction, he says, “was ‘Oh my God, this is amazing’ for everybody, even people who worried about how it would affect their businesses.”

Goodbye BBN, Hello DARPA

Kahn officially left BBN the day after the demo concluded to join DARPA (the agency having recently added the word “Defense” to its name). He felt he’d done what he could on networking and was ready for a new challenge.

“They hired me to run a hundred-million-dollar program on automated manufacturing. It was an opportunity of a lifetime, to get on the factory floor, to figure out how to distribute processing, distribute artificial intelligence, use distributed sensors.”

Bob Kahn served on the MIT faculty from 1964 to 1966.Bob Kahn

Soon after he arrived at DARPA, Congress pulled the plug on funding for the proposed automated-manufacturing effort. Kahn shrugged his shoulders and figured he’d go back to MIT. But Roberts asked Kahn to stay. Kahn did, but rather than work on ARPANET he focused on developing packet radio, packet satellite, and even, he says, packetizing voice, a technology that led to VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) today.

Getting those new networks up and running wasn’t always easy. Irwin Jacobs, who had just cofounded Linkabit and later cofounded Qualcomm, worked on the project. He recalls traveling through Europe with Kahn, trying to convince organizations to become part of the network.

“We visited three PTTs [postal, telegraph, and telephone services],” Jacobs said, “in Germany, in France, and in the U.K. The reactions were all the same. They were very friendly, they gave us the morning to explain packet switching and what we were thinking of doing, then they would serve us lunch and throw us out.” But the two of them kept at it.

“We took a little hike one day,” Jacobs says. “There was a steep trail that went up the side of a fjord, water coming down the opposite side. We came across an old man, casting a line into the stream rushing downhill. He said he was fishing for salmon, and we laughed—what were his chances? But as we walked uphill, he yanked on his rod and pulled out a salmon.” The Americans were impressed with his determination.

“You have to have confidence in what you are trying to do,” Jacobs says. “Bob had that. He was able to take rejection and keep persisting.”

Ultimately, a government laboratory in Norway, the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, and a laboratory at University College London came on board—enough to get the satellite network up and running.

And Then Came the Internet

With the ARPANET, packet-radio, and packet-satellite networks all operational, it was clear to Kahn that the next step would be to connect them. He knew that the ARPANET design all by itself wouldn’t be useful for bringing together these disparate networks.

“Number one,” he says, “the original ARPANET protocols required perfect delivery, and if something didn’t get through and you didn’t get acknowledgment, you kept trying until it got through. That’s not going to work if you’re in a noisy environment, if you’re in a tunnel, if you’re behind a mountain, or if somebody’s jamming you. So I wanted something that didn’t require perfect communication.”

“Number two,” he continues, “you wanted something that didn’t have to wait for everything in a message to get through before the next message could get through.

“And you had no way in the ARPANET protocols for telling a destination what to do with the information when it got there. If a router got a packet and it wasn’t for another node on the ARPANET, it would assume ‘Oh, must be for me.’ It had nowhere else to send it.”

Initially, Kahn assigned the network part of the IP addresses himself, keeping a record on a single index card he carried in his shirt pocket.

“Vint, as a computer scientist, thought of things in terms of bits and computer programs. As an electrical engineer, I thought about signals and bandwidth and the nondigital side of the world.”—Bob Kahn

He approached Vint Cerf, then an assistant professor at Stanford University, who had been involved with Kahn in testing the ARPANET during its development, and he asked him to collaborate.

“Vint, as a computer scientist, thought of things in terms of bits and computer programs. As an electrical engineer, I thought about signals and bandwidth and the nondigital side of the world. We brought together different sets of talents,” Kahn says.

“Bob came out to Stanford to see me in the spring of 1973 and raised the problem of multiple networks,” Cerf recalls. “He thought they should have a set of rules that allowed them to be autonomous but interact with each other. He called it internetworking.”

“He’d already given this serious thought,” Cerf continues. “He wanted SRI to host the operations of the packet-radio network, and he had people in the Norwegian defense-research establishment working on the packet-satellite network. He asked me how we could make it so that a host on any network could communicate with another in a standardized way.”

Cerf was in.

The two met regularly over the next six months to work on “the internetworking problem.” Between them, they made some half a dozen cross-country trips and also met one-on-one whenever they found themselves attending the same conference. In July 1973, they decided it was time to commit their ideas to paper.

“I remember renting a conference room at the Cabana Hyatt in Palo Alto,” Kahn says. The two planned to sequester themselves there in August and write until they were done. Kahn says it took a day; Cerf remembers it as two, or at least a day and a half. In any case, they got it done in short order.

Cerf took the first crack at it. “I sat down with my yellow pad of paper,” he says. “And I couldn’t figure out where to start.”

“I went out to pay for the conference room,” Kahn says. “When I came back Vint was sitting there with the pencil in his hand—and not a single word on the paper.”

Kahn admits that the task wasn’t easy. “If you tried to describe the United States government,” he says, “what would you say first? It’s the buildings, it’s the people, it’s the Constitution. Do you talk about Britain? Do you talk about Indians? Where do you start?”

In 1997, President Bill Clinton [right] presented the National Medal of Technology to Bob Kahn [center] and Vint Cerf [left].Bob Kahn

Kahn took the pencil from Cerf and started writing. “That’s his style,” Cerf says, “write as much as you can and edit later. I tend to be more organized, to start with an outline.”

“I told him to go away,” Kahn says, “and I wrote the first eight or nine pages. When Vint came back, he looked at what I had done and said, ‘Okay, give me the pencil.’ And he wrote the next 20 or 30 pages. And then we went back and forth.”

Finally, Cerf walked off with the handwritten version to give to his secretary to type. When she finished, he told her to throw that original draft away. “Historians have been mad at me ever since,” Cerf says.

“It might be worth a fortune today,” Kahn muses. The resulting paper, published in the IEEE Transactions on Communications in 1974, represented the basis of the Internet as we now know it. It introduced the Transmission Control Protocol, later separated into two parts and now known as TCP/IP.

A New World on an Index Card

A key to making this network of networks work was the Internet Protocol (IP) addressing system. Every new host coming onto the network required a new IP address. These numerical labels uniquely identify computers and are used for routing packets to their locations on the network.

Initially, Kahn assigned the network part of the IP addresses himself, keeping a record of who had been allotted what set of numbers on a single index card he carried in his shirt pocket. When that card began to fill up in the late ‘70s, he decided it was time to turn over the task to others. It became the responsibility of Jon Postel, and subsequently that of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) at the University of Southern California. IANA today is part of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf visited Yellowstone National Park together in the early 2000s.Bob Kahn

Kahn moved up the DARPA ladder, to chief scientist, deputy director, and, in 1979, director of the Information Processing Techniques Office. He stayed in that last role until late 1985. At DARPA, in addition to his networking efforts, he launched the VLSI [very-large-scale integration] Architecture and Design Project and the billion-dollar Strategic Computing Initiative.

In 1985, with political winds shifting and government research budgets about to shrink substantially, Kahn left DARPA to form a nonprofit dedicated to fostering research on new infrastructures, including designing and prototyping networks for computing and communications. He established it as the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI).

Kahn reached out to industry for funding, making it clear that, as a nonprofit, CNRI intended to make its research results open to all. Bell Atlantic, Bellcore, Digital Equipment Corp., IBM, MCI, NYNEX, Xerox, and others stepped up with commitments that totaled over a million dollars a year for several years. He also reached out to the U.S. National Science Foundation and received funding to build testbeds to demonstrate technology and applications for computer networks at speeds of at least a gigabit. CNRI also obtained U.S. government funding to create a secretariat for the Internet Activities Board, which eventually led to the establishment of the Internet Engineering Task Force, which has helped evolve Internet protocols and standards. CNRI ran the secretariat for about 18 years.

Cerf joined Kahn at CNRI about six months after it started. “We were thinking about applications of the Internet,” Cerf says. “We were interested in digital libraries, as were others.” Kahn and Cerf sought support for such work, and DARPA again came through, funding CNRI to undertake a research effort involving building and linking digital libraries at universities.

They also began working on the concept of “Knowbots,” mobile software programs that could collect and store information to be used to handle distributed tasks on a network.

As part of that digital library project, Kahn collaborated with Robert Wilensky at the University of California, Berkeley, on a paper called “A Framework for Distributed Digital Object Services,” published in the International Journal on Digital Libraries in 2006.

The Digital Object Emerges

Out of this work came the idea that today forms the basis of much of Kahn’s current efforts: digital objects, also known as digital entities. A digital object is a sequence of bits, or a set of such sequences, having a unique identifier. A digital object may incorporate a wide variety of information—documents, movies, software programs, wills, and even cryptocurrency. The concept of a digital object, together with distributed repositories, metadata registries, and a decentralized identifier resolution system, form the digital-object architecture. From its identifier, a digital object can be located even if it moves to a different place on the net. Kahn’s collaborator on much of this work is his wife, Patrice Lyons, a copyright and communications lawyer.

Initially, CNRI maintained the registry of Digital Object Identifier (DOI) records. Then those came to be kept locally, and CNRI maintained just the registry of prefix records. In 2014, CNRI handed off that responsibility to a newly formed international body, the DONA Foundation in Geneva. Kahn serves as chair of the DONA board. The organization uses multiple distributed administrators to operate prefix registries. One, the International DOI Foundation, has handled close to 100 billion identifiers to date. The DOI system is used by a host of publishers, including IEEE, as well as other organizations to manage their digital assets.

A plaque commemorating the ARPANET now stands in front of the Arlington, Va., headquarters of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Bob Kahn

Kahn sees this current effort as a logical extension of the work he did on the ARPANET and then the Internet. “It’s all about how we use the Internet to manage information,” he says.

Kahn, now 85, works more than five days a week and has no intention of slowing down. The Internet, he says, is still in its startup phase. Why would he step back now?

“I once had dinner with [historian and author] David McCullough,” Kahn explains. Referring to the 1974 paper he wrote with Cerf, he says, “I told him that if I were sitting in the audience at a meeting, people wouldn’t say ‘Here’s what the writers of this paper really meant,’ because I would get up and say, ‘Well we wrote that and….’ “

“I asked McCullough, ‘When do you consider the end of the beginning of America?’” After some discussion, McCullough put the date at 4 July 1826, when both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson passed away.

Kahn agreed that their deaths marked the end of the country’s startup phase, because Adams and Jefferson never stopped worrying about the country that they helped create.

“It was such an important thing that they were doing that their lives were completely embedded in it,” Kahn says. “And the same is true for me and the Internet.”

This article appears in the May 2024 print issue as “The Great Interconnector.”

When I was a wee lad, my grandfather, an avid gardener, walked with me down to the end of his immaculately tended botanical kingdom, and bid I look upon his favourite flowers, bright blooms of Geraniums. He was a humble man, but even he could not disguise his pride at how wonderfully full and rich their colours and forms had come in this year. “Does the fragile beauty of these blooms not fill you with tender hope for the future?” he asked. “No, Grandad,” I replied, “these flowers are mid.”

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