This is a free piece at The Journal, so click through. Short, with some great facts.
and the article may be a perspective, but I recall when the DOD did what they did and the article (which I have now read but don’t regard as gospel) leaves the DOD out.
Read the book “Where Wizards Stay up Late” and you will actually know the answer:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/0684832674
It is an excellent article. Note the comments after, though. Some folks are freaking out. I’d like the hear the author follow up on some of the datapoints that others are spilling, though.....
I also loved the factoid about Jobs getting the investment (and the info) from Xerox private capital / equity....a less there, also regarding companies too large to change.
I think AT&T started digitizing its long distance lines to reduce line loss before ARPA got involved.
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.
“It wasn’t Al Gore. “
But...but...but...he SAID he did!
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.
So BUSH invented the internet!!
So, the long and short of it: Al Gore & the federal gubmint didn’t invent the internets?
A just-in-case-you-might-be-interested ping...
the gorey truth about the creation of the internet.
Obama said: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
He could not have made a greater,or dumber, statement.
He summed up in one sentence what at heart and soul he truly believes.
Anyone who owns a bussiness, or indirectly derives a income from bussiness or industry, would have to be flat out crazy to vote to reelect this authoritarian control freak nutwad.
Didn’t someone have to be on the Internet before they could log on?
Didn’t somebody have to create that account so they could log on?
Was that person already logged onto the Internet when they created that account?
Which came first - the Internet or the login?
Am I logged on?
btt
When Gore said he invented the internet, I think it was a Marxist code for the Community Organized Network of thugs on the net.
I’m sorry, but this article is inaccurate and substantially denigrates the role that Robert Taylor’s championship of ARPAnet and the funding he provided to build the equipment and the network used to try out the idea of packet switching, a la ARAPnet.
There are several fine books on the history of the Internet that accurately depict what really happened.
Given the right circumstances, small amounts of government funding for advanced technologies can be beneficial, and ARPA/DARPA has been one of the most successful of all the funding agencies. Like the Bell Labs of yore, visionary leaders unfettered by bureaucracy and politics would place bets on small groups of INDIVIDUAL geniuses and their ideas and then get the hell out of the way and let those geniuses do their thing in a conducive environment. At Bell Labs we got the transistor, satellite communications, information theory, the MASER, the LASER, cellular telephony and fiber optics, just to name a few of the peace-time revolutions fostered there with that model.
And ARPA/DARPA was instrumental in fostering the foundation technologies of the Internet using similar methods. That simply cannot be taken away from them and Robert Taylor.
However, what does NOT work is crony capitalism, a la our Communist-in-Chief Barrack Obama (which was never meant to accomplish anything but kickback taxpayer bucks to campaign fund bundlers anyway) or legions of ignorant bureaucrats shoveling taxpayer money by the truck-load to politically favored “researchers” pursuing politically favored theories (e.g., anthropogenic global warming, Darwinism, etc.)
I was present in academia during the post-ARAPnet to current Internet transition, and in fact, played a part in that transition, including performing the system engineering and obtaining grant funding for a short-lived transitional Internet technology post-ARPAnet that was used to boot-strap NSFnet.
I would also add that one of the absolute great and unsung heroes of the Internet saga is a fellow by the name of Stephen Wolff at the National Science foundation, who DISMANTLED and DEFUNDED NSFnet following its wild success in interconnecting the major university and civilian research centers around the nation. Most in academia thought Stephen was crazy, but I immediately understood his goal, namely to vastly expand to the whole world the reach of the Internet from just the elite few who were funded exclusively by the taxpayer, by having the government fund only PRIVATE enterprise to replace the academic NSFnet services which had heretofore been directly funded and operated by government entities.
Steven recognized that continuing with the NSFnet as a government-operated Internet stifled its expansion to the great unwashed masses outside of academia, and he recognized the enormous potential of this technology for the whole world, and he understood the massively building demand to expand NSFnet services.
Steven also recognized that private enterprise was the best way to expand the Internet, that competition for profit amongst private enterprise would vastly outstrip any feeble government Internet expansion efforts, as well as driving costs down due to competition, none of which was possible with a government Internet monopoly.
Steven’s visionary plan was to defund the direct operation of the NSFnet by government entities by defunding those entities and instead parceling out the same funds to the academic end-user-academic-institutions who would replace their previous NSFnet Internet connection by bidding for services from one or more private entities who would build NEW privately-operated Internets with the seed money from those bids. Once built for academia, the private networks could then expand to eventually encompass the whole world.
As we all know, Steven’s brilliant visionary plan worked, even though almost no one knows that there was in fact such a plan or that it was Steven’s!
Don’t get me wrong, NSFnet and its government funding was a VITAL step towards the world wide Internet. It was the testbed for the original commercial Internet equipment makers and the original communications links providers. It was in fact what allowed Cisco and many others to start up in the first place. But. And that’s a big but. Without Steven Wolff and his visionary plan to convert the successes of the government-operated NSFnet into a private-enterprise proposition, the Internet would have remained nothing more than a slightly glorified version of France’s defunct government-operated Minitel network.
Should the NSFnet have transpired today under the Obammunistic reign of terror, there would have been no Steven Wolff at the NSF as Obama has stocked all Federal agencies from top to bottom with those who must past his litmus test of fascist socialism.
Prior to Obama and his predecessor ilk, giants did indeed use to stride the earth: intellectual giants of individual genius, perseverance and accomplishment. Today our ground is trod merely by envious socialists who coast along on the past genius and work of others, and who spend no energy except to obstruct, denigrate and steal the accomplishments of those from the past, present, and future.
Think about it. What was the last transformational technology post-WWII that has occurred after:
1. The invention of the transistor,
2. Invention of the technologies for geosynchronous satellite communication,
3. Invention of the cellular telephone system,
4. Invention of the PC,
5. Invention of the Internet,
6. Invention of the solid-state laser,
7. Invention of fiber optics,
8. Invention of the integrated circuit,
9. Invention of the microprocessor?
Nothing like those transformative technologies have been invented during the last 20 years. Why is that?
...and AOHell almost killed it off again.
The internet would be worthless unless it was made accessible to masses. The private companies including compuserve, netscape and AOL made the internet useable.
If Government were in charge we would be using dial-up and DOS like screens.
DARPA? PLATO preceded DARPA Net.
PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations) was the first (ca. 1960, on ILLIAC I) generalized computer assisted instruction system, and, by the late 1970s, comprised several thousand terminals worldwide on nearly a dozen different networked mainframe computers. Originally, PLATO was built by the University of Illinois and functioned for four decades, offering coursework (elementary–university) to UIUC students, local schools, and other universities. Several descendant systems still operate.
The PLATO project was assumed by the Control Data Corporation (CDC), who built the machines with which PLATO operated at the University. CDC President William Norris planned to make PLATO a force in the computer world; the last production PLATO system was shut down in 2006 (coincidentally, just a month after Norris died), yet it established key on-line concepts: forums, message boards, online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multi-player games.