The internet was originally the concept of scientists at various universities who had email and chat functions (kind of a crude intranet) on their universities’ computer and wanted to communicate and share data. The next step was DARPANET, developed by the Defense Advanced Projects Administration in northern Virginia. But it was essentially private enterprise that recognized the enormous commercial possibilities of connected computers and ran with it. If we had continued to wait for government to roll it out, we’d all still be on dialup AOL 2.0 and consider ourselves lucky. ONLY competition and the promise of some payoff stirs humans to strive and innovate.
I don’t see any mention of Al Gore.
I used the first version of the internet. We used to send crude “emails” but they went to a printer. Later on they went to a screen. You had to have the printer ID or screen ID to send and everyone could read the messages.
If I recall correctly, the first image online was the moonrocks. It took ages to load. That might be due to the fact that a lot of people really wanted to see this image of moonrocks.