RE:Gore and the Internet
I know this is a dumb thing to do. I don't remember Gore's exact words when he made the speech that a lot of people say he made the claim to "inventing" the Internet, but I do know what his role was. I first encountered the Internet during the early to mid-80s. It was primarily Usenet and e-mail, I used both. Usenet was a lot smaller and was organized differently, everything started with a net. and was usually single level, like net.origins which discussed creationism and it's attendant flames. There also was net.flames for those who really couldn't help themselves. Anyway, back in those days the only way to access the Internet was to either host a node or be associated with someplace that hosted one. Dialup access for anyone else was essentially impossible, I know, I tried when I left UTMB. During that time period, the government started a project to allow universities to have access to supercomputers. They built a center for the hardware, and then a backbone was laid to allow the universities to have highspeed access to the center. Well, the idea was a bust, the cost of minicomputers and workstations dropped to the point that it became cost effective to do the computing locally instead of timesharing the big iron. Now I am sure someone laid it all out for Al, but Gore was the Congresscritter that pushed the idea of transferring the Internet to the backbone and allowing the ISPs to sell access to the Internet, making the "info-superhighway" available to more than the select few. The backbone was later transferred to private industry, I don't know the details of that. The point being, without Gore, or someone else who did the same things, the Internet would not exist right now. it would have been too expensive and too speculative to have private industry to invest in it. So even if he did not invent it, he was instrumental in what it has become. To argue differently is probably either dishonest or ignorant. |
