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 ...
LOL
We used to use those funny keypads installing speed dialers onto phone systems in the 80’s
Thanks for posting this link. Great timeline from 1962 to 1992. Explains the beginning of connecting computers to the visual graphics.
“During the summer, students at NCSA in University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign modify Tim Berners-Lee’s hypertext proposal. In a few weeks MOSAIC is born within the campus. Larry Smarr shows it to Jim Clark, who founds Netscape as a result.
The WWW bursts into the world and the growth of the Internet explodes like a supernova.”
The Internet was created by Judge Greene. ;-)
Years ago, I was a contracted private English teacher to a high up Sony executive who had been moved over to a Sony subsidiary and needed to up his English skill level for the new job.
He was a decent, honest man, but more interested in reliving his past contributions to the company than in developing the English skills necessary for his future in the company. This was, in fact, the normal case for people in similar positions.
Anyway, since my Japanese skills were far better than your average contracted private English teacher, we soon developed a friendship. The gentleman was eventually a very useful connection in getting me out of English teaching and into serious corporate work.
One day, he told me he had been deeply involved in the Betamax development. They were smaller, better quality and technologicallty superior to the VHS technology. The Betamax was also on the market first.
While it is true that Sony did make the error of believing the major market for the technology would be people who would record their own television shows rather than a player technology for prerecorded shows, what made the VHS eventually win out was sheer market penetration.
The key reason for this was that Sony had limited prerecorded offerings (software) and refused to get involved in the distribution of pornography. The VHS rival technology did not. As a result of the Betamax loss, Sony bought (and nearly went under financially) Columbia Pictures and became less family friendly.
When Sony took down Toshiba with the Blu-Ray technology over the HD-DVD more recently, they had both the software (Columbia) and the lack of moral restraint against distributing pornography to fight that war to a strategic victory.
You meant Silicon Valley. Silicone Valley is somewhere near Hollywood.
” it was private individuals who made it small enough and powerful enough and fast enought “
And people think Thomas Edison invented the first electric light bulb. He did not! Not even close! But he improved it, and made it practical. He was also known to be quite an a-hole!
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bllight2.htm
The '70's is way before your '80's.
I was using public internet in the '80's. I certainly wouldn't give the DOD the credit.
I remember my brothers using TI’s and Commodores in the early 80’s to connect to BBS’ and the money quote that forever haunts me is “Can you imagine being able to connect any library in the world and read every book ever written?”
Told them it was stupid and a waste of time. I also recall those cassettes were, to me, just plain lame.
LOL
And yet, here I sit wasting time and whenever I want I can read just about any book every written....
If I’d only had a little imagination who knows where I’d be today...
Ya had me going until I read you about page and fould you are a lawyer.
Kidding, just kidding, take it easy
So BUSH invented the internet!!
funny factoid most people don’t know.
ROLM, the first major PBX manufacturer to make Voice Mail work with it’s system was also one of the 1st companies to provide military hardened computers to the military.
Ever see the movie, “Middlement”? It is historically interesting and the opening part is especially fascinating, and dead on.
BTW, those prices look pretty good but it looks like some of that stuff would result in injury. It also looks pretty “racy”!
It is not a coincidence that many, if not most, of the key innovations which we enjoy today can trace their ancestry back to one of the following:
My university had an intranet by 1977, with email and chat capabilities. Many of us students received homework assignments, studied graphic presentations of subject matter, communicated with our professors, or submitted assignments through this system. In retrospect it was not all that clunky. Being able to dial up the university from one's home-brew computer and work from the home office was a great convenience and a real thrill.
When it comes to distributing entertainment media, if you have moral restraints, it will be your undoing. It is quite sad, really. I did not like the prominent display of the 50 shades of gray books in Costco last Saturday.
They speak of the world wide web early on, but as I recall the eb came about after the development of the magellen browser that fully enabled HTML and the world wide web.
The Magellan and subsequent Netscape browsers were certainly not government developed so the Messianic claim is yet another indication of his shallow education.
Sony could have/should have been Apple. They had the Walkman decades before mp3 players existed. Now that Apple has a reputation to protect they are becoming more like Sony and won't distribute seedy material. They probably won't make the transition into the coming consumer robotics "dot com II" boom.
So, the long and short of it: Al Gore & the federal gubmint didn’t invent the internets?
Researchers in the Silicone Valley
You meant Silicon Valley. Silicone Valley is somewhere near Hollywood.
Yikes, global spell check and global find and replace is not my friend.
Actually, now I can one up Al Gore and say I invented the Silicone Valley.
Sounds pretty impressive does it not?
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