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 ...
“healing” of network communications
Unfortunately the Internet we have to day is nowhere near the robust and self healing network they envisioned.
Take out a few key nodes and it’s worthless.
Don't know about 1939, but by the 60's and 70's, Picturephone was just the right fit. AT&T had control of dial network and the wire. PP allowed for xmit and rec of images and voice over three twisted pair through the dial network. Of course that all changed 1/1/84.
I felt totally compelled to copy the pic you posted in #24, for future use. It truly represents the individual.
That’s right. If ‘the Internet’ is going to be defined as the ability for computers to communicate across networks, you’ve really watered it down to something beyond that which we know today. Businesses were looking for and working on such basic interconnection for decades. For example, TCP/IP just happens to be one standard protocol that one out—largely as a ‘beyond IBM’ solution—in no small part because Ethernet cofounder Bob Metcalfe left PARC and in the late ‘70s founded 3Com, which successfully commercialized it.
It really is the ‘world wide web’ as proposed by Timothy Berners-Lee in the late ‘80s and which he commercialized in the early ‘90s that led to the phenomenon we know today.
There were weak attempts, known as ‘value-added networks’, through the ‘80s to provide a consumer-level network service that provided some of the more basic, popular Internet capabilities that spread like wildfire once TBL got netscape cranking.
This is where I learned who invented the internet when I visited it in the 1990’s.
The thing about DARPA is there are no “DARPA labs” where things are designed, built, or coded. They essentially develop requirements and fund industry/FFRDCs/college labs to develop things.
I’ve worked on multiple DARPA projects (with a private contractor) so I think I know what I’m talking about.
They aren’t “performers” - there’s no DARPA lab where government DARPA employees in white coats are designing death rays or writing code. DARPA headquarters is a small office building where people manage contracts and move money around.
What DARPA does is solicit ideas, generate requests for proposals, choose contractors, fund them, manage programs, and then tries to get the military to transition those projects.
“To fulfill its mission, the Agency relies on diverse performers...”
I can’t verify this anywhere else but in one of Duckie’s ramblings on an NCIS episode he said that photography was invented for porn.
Interest in porn is just a symptom of a man who does not have a satisfying sex life at home.
It should be recognized that the military plays a key role in driving the cutting edge of technology and the future wealth of our country. Military need drove the initial development of nuclear, computer, internet, microwave, jet airplane technology. This process has been true for thousands of years. That’s because the military is usually the first customer for a new technology because only they are willing to pay the initial price. We’re seeing that today in robotics. Technology is the second front in our fight against socialism/big government and the military is on our side. In the future robots will be the first worker class in history that don’t mind having all their work output confiscated. Socialism might finally be sustainable. The race to push technology is very important in the fight to prevent America from being destroyed by leftism. If we continue to defund the military, we our defunding our future.
Heck, the guy doesn’t even understand the protocols he’s talking about. He’s describing Ethernet as a protocol for connecting networks together. This is false. Ethernet is a local area network protocol for creating a network. He does mention TCP/IP, and that’s the important one for connecting networks together. Ethernet just happens to be the protocol which won, but there have been plenty of various LAN protocols over time.
I can remember using ARPANET back in my undergrad days before the internet really got opened to general use. Back then it was restricted mostly to universities, defense and research labs.
It was when Tim Bethers-Lee came up with the html protocol at CERN that the internet exploded. Before that it was limited to email and netnews groups which were just text based forums. I spent a lot of time on those old forums.
I can still remember when the post doc came into the lab to show off Mosaic to demonstrate this new web thing. The software was extremely buggy and there was about nothing to connect to in any case. Amazing how far it has all come.
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.
Boy, are YOU missing out. They have soda-machines ******* with zombie donkeys now. This is GOOD STUFF!
“It wasn’t Al Gore. “
But...but...but...he SAID he did!
***BUMP***
Dr Buzzard, you have indeed nailed it (w/apologies to Laz lol)
Academics at Universities really picked up on the net as way to communicate with colleagues world wide at time when long distance phone calls were very expensive.
Originally the net was tightly controlled by DOD.
In a historic quirk of fate, the the breakdown of the Soviet Union coincided almost perfectly with the development and mass marketing of powerful personal computers to consumers in the general public.
These users of these computers needed a way to link up and network with other users.
Researchers in the Silicone Valley were familiar with the ARPA net because many of them had worked on the development of the system or had been users of the system while in Grad School.
At universities like Stanford, the distinction between official and personal use of the net became blurred in the dynamic, free wheeling academic environment prevailing at the time as personal computer ownership by student and faculty soared and the DOD controls on the net wound down as the Cold War waned.
As a pioneer test case, Stanford University decided to wire the entire campus for networked communications from the dorms to the research labs and gave the project to a small Bay Area company run by a husband and wife team that developed and installed the hardware for the network using the ARPA net protocols as the framework for the system. The husband and wife did an amazing job of designing and building the hardware and even pulled the wire and installed the much of the system themselves. The system and the project was very successful and the husband and wife team went on to form a company known as Cisco Systems to commercialized the technology to the world market.
Stanford was a doable project because it already was extensively wired with infrastructure for the ARPA net, but the only existing infrastructure for a nation wide network was the DOD ARPA net.
At the same time the Cold War was winding down at an increasingly fast pace.
As the Cold War wound down, there were massive defense cuts so the military needs of the ARPA net declined and the DOD was looking for partners to share the enormous costs of keeping the network operating and maintaining it.
They looked to the emerging civilian computer networking industry to provide the necessary support.
Congress passed laws retooling the ARPA net for private use and the the rest is history. In fairness to AL Gore, he did take a lead in pushing this privatization.
No. that a telephone system.
Awesome. And we were here. We were here when there was nothing and here for the beginning. No, not just here, we participated in its birth and guided its infancy. Do we know what have we done? Do we understand what we’ve created? What will we do when it becomes aware? If this shall be created in our own image, perhaps we should be afraid...very afraid.
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