Posted on 07/23/2012 7:06:51 AM PDT by Pharmboy
Contrary to legend, it wasn't the federal government, and the Internet had nothing to do with maintaining communications during a war.
A telling moment in the presidential race came recently when Barack Obama said: "If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." He justified elevating bureaucrats over entrepreneurs by referring to bridges and roads, adding: "The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all companies could make money off the Internet."
It's an urban legend that the government launched the Internet. The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communications lines up even in a nuclear strike. The truth is a more interesting story about how innovation happens—and about how hard it is to build successful technology companies even once the government gets out of the way.
For many technologists, the idea of the Internet traces to Vannevar Bush, the presidential science adviser during World War II who oversaw the development of radar and the Manhattan Project....
...by the 1960s technologists were trying to connect separate physical communications networks into one global network—a "world-wide web." The federal government was involved, modestly, via the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Its goal was not maintaining communications during a nuclear attack, and it didn't build the Internet. Robert Taylor, who ran the ARPA program in the 1960s, sent an email to fellow technologists in 2004 setting the record straight: "The creation of the Arpanet was not motivated by considerations of war. The Arpanet was not an Internet. An Internet is a connection between two or more computer networks."
If the government didn't invent the Internet, who did?
(Excerpt) Read more at professional.wsj.com ...
This is a free piece at The Journal, so click through. Short, with some great facts.
well, actually the internet WAS in fact a DOD thing. I remember when we first started using it; I was a Captain in the Army in the early 80s. It was very clunky and weird to use
HA! I should have anticipated that...that dude’s pic never fails to make me smile.
And you can say the DOD was heavily involved in creating the computer itself
But, it was private individuals who made it small enough and powerful enough and fast enought so that you could view porn at home
Judas Priest, I am a female and a very serious Catholic I am not viewing any porn, unlike most
“the idea of the Internet traces to Vannevar Bush”
So, in this case we CAN say, “Bush did it.”
I love that quote.
One of the top BS lines in history.
I don't watch porn either, but this still made me guffaw. Its probably how many people do think about the 'net.
Read the article, it really was Bush’s fault!
Of course there was no one "inventor" of the Internet, nor a single development that created it, however the original project by DARPA, and the protocols developed by BBN were what morphed into the Internet we all know and Freep by.
Mark
"It's important to understand the history of the Internet because it's too often wrongly cited to justify big government."
A very interesting read, thanks!
But full credit goes to the company where Mr. Taylor worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox. It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks. Researchers there also developed the first personal computer (the Xerox Alto) and the graphical user interface that still drives computer usage today.This is my understanding of it. I've know about this from other sources for decades.
It is amazing at just how many technical innovations and their implementation into common usage have been driven by porn.
And cats.
But mostly porn.
Mark
AutoVON?
*** Even though we now borrow much of it, in the end, Americans who are private citizens will pay for it. In the end, no matter wht Obama and the Dems say, private citizens pay for gov, through money earned from business. PS- I did read the article...
SO.......Bush invented the internet....Vannevar Bush.
“In the early 80’s”
Yep, I remember that time. I built my first PC in 1982.
Ran with some really great techs then. Most of them worked for the labs near where I lived in NM.
In the mid-late 80s, when desktop computers became popular, BBS [Bulletin Board Systems] sprang up in all major cities. They included chat, downloads, forums. BBS’s connected home computers via a BBS center.
The ‘internet’ was not really available to the general public until about 1994. [My first experience on it was in late 1995. My first internet chat — in Fort Worth — was with a guy in Australia. I was in awe to be ‘chatting’ with someone half-way around the world in almost real time.]
ISPs and connection options blossumed during the next few years.
I recall that SWBell in Ft. Worth didn’t want to upgrade their telephone lines [residential Internet was dial-up, because cable TV providers had not entered the market yet]. SWBell official thought the internet was just a passing fad. In a couple of years (late 90s), the phone line connections were crowded — with landline phone, fax, and dial-up.
wow, yes, absolutely!!!!!!! I hadn’t thought about that word in years
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