Inventing The Internet

Failure is an orphan but success turns out to have many fathers ...

"It was under Bill Clinton that the Internet came of age."

Not so. I was using the Internet when Carter was still president.

You're right, I said the wrong thing. I was careless.

And it was a much nicer place then, too. (harrumph!) :-)

Of course, back then, there was no WikiWeb.

(The Web sprang into being during Clinton's presidency, but Clinton can't claim any credit for that.)

I thought the web came into being in the Bush years. Regardless of when it came around, it would be hard for Clinton take credit for it (not that he is stupid enough to) since is was created in Europe.

: I had thought that the work of TimBernersLee dated back to 1993, which would be after Clinton became president. But I looked it up, and it turns out the original work on HTTP and HTML dates to 1989-1990 (according to the press release issued when Berners-Lee received the MacArthur? grant).

Anyway, everyone knows that Al Gore invented the Internet. (jocular reference to a Gore PR fiasco during the US 2000 primary season)

: Actually, in all seriousness, the Internet wouldn't be what it is today if Al Gore, while in the U.S. Senate, hadn't had the vision to see the possibilities and sponsor various funding bills. The high-speed backbone called "NSFnet", as well as the National Supercomputing Centers at Cornell, Urbana, and elsewhere, were funded by legislation that GoreSponsored?. His level of technical literacy has always been 'way, 'WAY beyond that of 99% of his Congressional colleagues.

Please, Al Gore has the IQ of a chimpanzee (sorry to disappoint any chimps out there).

According to the latest release of Fire in the Valley, Vannevar Bush invented the Web. As for the rest it was around before Bubba became president. Commercial use was first allowed during the Bubba years, but the machinery was in the works before then.

Vannevar Bush? Who the heck is Vannevar Bush? Does this mean that Tim Berners-Lee is a liar? Was the MacArthur? grant given to the wrong person?

: VannevarBush wrote AsWeMayThink, a magazine article in which he described his MemexVision, which definitely influenced TedNelson in his ideas about "hypertext" (a term Nelson coined, as described in his book, Literary Machines). Nelson's ideas may (or may not) have influenced the thinking of Tim Berners-Lee (known to the Wiki as TimBernersLee), who wrote the original specifications of HTTP, HTML, and URLs, and wrote the first Web server and the first Web browser. It is vastly overstating the case to say that "VannevarBush invented the Web".

"In the late 1960s (during the administrations of Johnson and Nixon) the US military was desperately afraid of a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. Some US government computer scientists in the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) got together to design a 'bombproof' network to connect military bases and other military agencies. Their solution was ARPAnet, a network that transferred information between distant computers via 'packet switching' technology. ARPAnet's inventors realized the new network was useful for all kinds of data exchange and it was subsequently used to link both military and university-research computers. In the early 1980s (ReaganTime), ARPAnet switched its network technology to a newly developed set of protocols called TCP/IP and gradually (BushtoearlyClintontime?) this became what we now refer to as the Internet." C|NET Tech Trends, CNET Networks, Inc.1995-2000

: The reference to developments occurring during "ReaganTime?" is consistent with the references above to GoreSponsored? activities while serving in the U.S. Senate.

ARPAnet used the concept of packet switching, which of course was invented at the NPL in Britain.

What's the NPL in Britain?

See http://www.npl.co.uk/index.htm the UK National Physical Laboratory

Al Gore was dubbed the "self-proclaimed inventor of the internet" by the HypnoCracy?. Of course, the man never claimed any such thing. Gore was instrumental in getting the Clinton administration to invest heavily in net infrastructure, and there's no argument that his influence was tremendously positive online.

: OK, I'm curious. Exactly what positive influence did he have online?
: Read VintCerf and BobKahn describing Gore's role as the Internet's funding pioneer and infrastructure champion at http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/gore.shtml .
: I've got no problems with claims that he invested in the internet, championed its development, or something like that, but to make the leap from there to "creating" it was just too much.

Surely Gore actually put foot in mouth and claim he invented the thing.

Nope. What he said was

"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system."

So in which dialect of English does investing in something decades after it was first built mean you "created" that something? Where I come from, this is known as a lie.

The phraseology is self-serving, sure, but all political candidates talk like this. At least they do if they want to win. What Gore said was taken out of context big time, and used horribly by the HypnoCrats. A history of the sordid business is at http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue5_10/wiggins/.