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
“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.
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!
*** 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 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.
However even more key to the Internet is computer technology. Again entrepreneurs and private companies made the first integrated circuits (Fairchild Semiconductor), IBM and Xerox gave us the PC architecture and the basis for a windows graphic users interface and of course Bill Gates and Steven jobs were not government bureaucrats either.
Obama's assertion that the government invented the internet is as bogus as his birth certificate.
This is no different than Dear Leader's WHOPPER that "Ramadan" has been "observed" in the White House since Jefferson held the first "Iftar" dinner 200 years ago and gave the impression that this has been an ongoing "practice" ever since.
Complete and utter Bovine Excrement!!!
Jefferson NEVER held an "Iftar" dinner and it wasn't until our clueless, dupe and naive, "Compassionate Conservative" (Boosh) that the observance of Ramadan in the WH (to prove that Islam was/is a "Religion of Pieces") began as an annual event.
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.
Too bad the article doesn’t answer the question of exactly who invented the world wide interweb ethernet thingy.
What about Alexander Graham Bell, Marconi and Wernher Von Braugn. Edison and so many others. All of them built the foundation of what we call the internet. Tim Berners-Lee is credited with inventing the world wide web.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee
Bflr
I was using Prodigy to follow the Persian Gulf War in ‘90-’91. Clunky, slow, but the basics of the internet were all there.
YDBT!
“In the Beginning, ARPA created the ARPANET.
And the ARPANET was without form and void.
And darkness was upon the deep.
And the spirit of ARPA moved upon the face of the network and ARPA said, ‘Let there be a protocol,’ and there was a protocol. And ARPA saw that it was good.
And ARPA said, ‘Let there be more protocols,’ and it was so. And ARPA saw that it was good.
And ARPA said, ‘Let there be more networks,’ and it was so.”
— Danny Cohen
This Internet Timeline begins in 1962, before the word ‘Internet’ is invented. The world’s 10,000 computers are primitive, although they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. They have only a few thousand words of magnetic core memory, and programming them is far from easy.
Domestically, data communication over the phone lines is an AT&T monopoly. The ‘Picturephone’ of 1939, shown again at the New York World’s Fair in 1964, is still AT&T’s answer to the future of worldwide communications.
But the four-year old Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense, a future-oriented funder of ‘high-risk, high-gain’ research, lays the groundwork for what becomes the ARPANET and, much later, the Internet.
By 1992, when this timeline ends,
the Internet has one million hosts
the ARPANET has ceased to exist
computers are nine orders of magnitude faster
network bandwidth is twenty million times greater.
I remember accessing university sites in the 70’s via the old phone modems, and continually upgraded modems and chatted all over the world and had email, via a university server, in the early 90’s. All of my work for took place via phones and either interfaced with local BBS types or university for newsgroups and emails.
I don’t actually remember being assigned an IP address until much later.
The first browser I used in the early 90’s stored the graphic symbols on my computer rather and the what was transmitted was instructions and text. I remember the upgrades of loading additional graphics files / symbols. I wish I could remember the name of the “browser”.
What amazes me is how “simple” it all turned out. At the time I started using this and implementing this stuff it was very hard to do reliably.