Who Really Invented the Internet?

The Wall Street Journal ^ | July 23, 2012 | L. GORDON CROVITZ

[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?

[Traveler59]

If my memory can function, it started out early 80`s, `90`s as it was all BBS`s and newsgroup protocols and using GOPHER archive search engine out of Univ. of Wisconsin at the local library.

The GOPHER search engine came out of the Computer Science labs at the University of Minnesota, home of the Golden Gophers. The first node was at the U of M. But there was also the Archie search engine, and a Veronica search engine.

[Pharmboy]

I believe they just discovered (somewhere in a cave in southern Spain) that it was red-headed Neanderthals that were the first with the TCP/IP protocol...

[Traveler59]

what is autodin

Automated Digital Network. Either OCR or hand-jammed on TTY machines message traffic.

[RedMDer]

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[blam]

Bump.

(See, I didn't have anything to say)

[CyberAnt]

Exactly correct! The DOD created it for military use and it warped into commercial use.

I don’t know the specifics, but I can guess that contracts with the DOD were given access to the “internet” and thus the idea might have been born that it would be good for all commercial business. If anybody knows the real story - please post it so we can all be informed.

It’s sure been a help to me .. I broke my ankles a couple of years ago, and walking through stores and standing in line is not very easy to accomplish. My solution: I get on the internet and order what I need and have it delivered.

[ThomasPaine2000]

I too remember those days, can you say 300 baud???

[Mrite]

I had a friend who joined the Air Force in the late 70s. He learned how to be a key punch operator. Haven’t seen or thought of him for years, but that was HiTech back in the day...lol

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_programming_in_the_punched_card_era

[SunkenCiv]

:’)

[unixfox]

Isn’t it funny how Der Fuhrer conveniently left out the part about those that built the INFRASTRUCTURE upon which the Internet was built?

F U B O !! Friggin Traitor !!

[I_be_tc]

Later

[MarkL]

Tim Berners-Lee is credited with inventing the world wide web.

And then there was Mark Andreeson (et al), who actually helped make the WWW usable - Originally, the web was all character based. Anybody else remember Mosaic?

Mark

[bIlluminati]

I had my first modem around 1974 - didn’t have a computer then, of course. Talked a friend to switch from making keyboards to making modems. Sadly they made Hayes-compatible rather than my design ... borrowed from a certain Cap’n. But USRX was a decent success anyway.

Starting in 1979 I did have multiple computers and hooked into one that a little outfit out of McLean, VA was leasing during its off-hours - some of the employees of this internet service were quite spooky. von Meister started that, and after getting squeezed, he started another service called America On Line. Readers Digest bought out The Source, but never understood how to price it for growth.

[MarkL]

Many years before 1994, amateur (ham) radio operators, myself included, were “chatting” with people all around the world in actual real time without using phone lines or satellites.

A buddy of mine was a HAM, and as I recall, he was using a VIC-20 and PET to do packet switched communications over short wave back in the early or mid 80s.

Mark

[bIlluminati]

Do you remember when the internet community chastised a user for trying to sell his computer or something in his messages?

I believe you are are referring to the first spam message. back then, there were only a few hundred computers in a university net, and this idiot sent a message to everybody on the entire network. It was considered bad form, and still is, to send unsolicited commercial email, UCE, aka spam.

[MarkL]

There is some truth to the contention that the government invented the internet, but only in terms of the DARPA projects as you say, though the guy invented html on CERN’s dime which is government as well. Fully blossoming it into what it is today was a matter of private enterprise and it really does show the value of the free market because the whole internet/web area of commerce was so poorly understood by governments that they didn’t vaguely know how to start regulating it. Thus it was not strangled in infancy.

You make a good point, that a part of the Internet's infancy occurred in government funded projects. But thank goodness that it was the free market where the Internet grew up. I once had a conversation with an Air Force major, trying to explain to him that "there is NO SUCH THING and an OSI compliant TCP/IP protocol stack!" This was back in the day when the government declared that government agencies needed to have OSI compliant software - to the best of my knowledge, that would have limited their networking software to Decnet (Phase III, I think). I shudder to think what government control of the Internet and its protocols would look like today.

Mark

[MarkL]

You forgot 3a) The Roswell, NM reverse engineering...

Mark

[MarkL]

and UUCP

I remember using "bang paths" for uucp and email.

Mark

[MarkL]

With Bill Gunning, I am personally responsible for 10-base-T ethernet

Grrrrr!!!! I installed a whole bunch of Novell networks using LattisNet back before the IEEE adopted your baby!

Mark

[MarkL]

I remember the transition from BBS and the internet being like an exclusive club and the invasion of the bohunk WebTvers.

There were a couple of "transitions" that were available before common public access to the Internet, like Compuserve, Prodigy, and for BBS system, FIDOnet.

I remember those days, as well as the first time I presented by boss with a $100 bill for my CI$ usage!

Mark