[1][2] Cohen is probably now best known for his 1980 paper "On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace"[3] which adopted the terminology of endianness for computing (a term borrowed from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels).

Cohen served on the computer science faculty at several universities and worked in private industry.

Cohen's flight simulation work led to the development of the Cohen-Sutherland computer graphics line clipping algorithms, created with Ivan Sutherland at Harvard University.

[5] After serving on the computer science faculty at Harvard through 1973, and at California Institute of Technology in 1976, Cohen joined the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California to work on a packet-voice project designed to allow interactive, real-time speech over the ARPANet (and the Internet during its early development).

[citation needed] In 1993, he worked on Distributed Interactive Simulation through several projects funded by the United States Department of Defense (DoD).

[citation needed] In 1993 Cohen received the Meritorious Civilian Service Award from the United States Air Force.