Who Really Invented the Internet?

The Wall Street Journal ^ | July 23, 2012 | L. GORDON CROVITZ

[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?

[MarkL]

I am sure it would be at least 20 years behind where it is today or still just a university based curiosity.

Government mandate of IE 6?

Heck, we'd still be using Windows 3.0, Winsock, and Mosaic.

Mark

[bIlluminati]

When pros read ‘The Soul of a New Machine’, they immediately went out and shorted the company. Fascinating read, and almost a canonical example of ‘how not to’. However, many others read it and assumed that 80 hour weeks were the way to go. Much buggy software ensued.

[MarkL]

NeXT OS was sweet, and technically should have won. Sigh.

IIRC, much of NeXT/OS wound up in the modern Mac OS. Aren't both based on CMU's MACH?

As an aside, back in the Windows 3 days, I switched my shell to this NeXTStep (looking) clone, and my Windows desktop looked a lot like it was running on a NeXT.

Mark

[bIlluminati]

Researchers in the Silicone Valley

I've done extensive research in the Silicone Valley (see #73), but perhaps you meant the Silicon Valley?

[Lancey Howard]

Hmm.. Well, we reverse-engineered the transistor from the Roswell UFO crash, so who knows what else we recovered?
Maybe the basics for the internet, too.

[rdcbn]

Yeah, it took me a moment or so to figure out where he was going with that one :-).

Enjoy your research. As they say, the journey is the reward.

[bIlluminati]

as well as B & C

Never got to P and L?

Blitter in '73? Sweet. I was laboring with a pair of 4004s. Used them to make music (getting the timing just right) along with some spare klystrons that needed to be tested.

[bIlluminati]

Did you have an IP address ?

4.

[bIlluminati]

can you say 300 baud???

Dual speed - 110 AND 300 baud. Could get more out of a homebrew AppleCat.

[PhilDragoo]

I heard the sound of a phone modem the other day, can't remember where.

My grandfather took me up to an entire floor of a building in Columbus, Ohio to a sea of punched card machines fluttering down in blurring stacks like the rain in Africa and the '55 Chevy Nomad was the fascinating development to me.

Later the Commodore 64 with the funny cassette pasting white letters on a black screen, a Sony Trinitron for a monitor.

Credit might be given George Orwell/Eric Blair for the telescreen, but as it was strictly government--IT FAILED.

fubo, fubare, fubavi, fubatus

[mkjessup]

When pros read ‘The Soul of a New Machine’, they immediately went out and shorted the company. Fascinating read, and almost a canonical example of ‘how not to’. However, many others read it and assumed that 80 hour weeks were the way to go. Much buggy software ensued.

However there was much sardonic humor when one of those buggy features was discovered, i.e., one of the games included in the Data General software package was the old text-based 'Adventure' where you are inside a mountain and you move with 'forward', 'right', 'left', 'up', 'down', etc., and interact with the various characters that way as well. In one cave there is the word 'xyzzy' on the wall and if you type that in, it 'magically' transports you to another region of the maze. However if you try typing in that word in the wrong area, the game responds with 'nothing happens'. Ok, now the stage is set:

IF, while using the CLI (Command Line Interpreter) under Data General's AOS (or AOS/VS), and you type in the word 'xyzzy', AOS responds the same way: 'nothing happens'.

We laughed many times at n00b computer operators who thought they were quite the whiz at playing 'Adventure' who were nudged into trying the 'magic word' in the real-time AOS-world, LOL

[bunkerhill7]

Yes thank you for rekindling my memory -Archie, U of Minn- I stand corrected after scores of years and the memory just ain`t that good anymore/ There was also an archival world-wide newspaper database but I forgot the name.

[Frank_2001]

I agree!

[hamboy]

Mr. Taylor didn’t build that.

Yeah right! Neither the FR poster I replied said Mr. Taylor built it but he said the company where he worked.

I'm listening to Rush via KNZZ, at 11:20 MST he just mentioned Mr. Taylor's name and Xerox PARC, TCP/IP, etc...

[dragnet2]

Limbaugh just mentioned Free Republic and Jim Robinson regarding the Internet.

[hamboy]

Limbaugh just mentioned Free Republic and Jim Robinson regarding the Internet.

Yeah I did, too. I posted I actually explored on the job a network Xerox DocuTech with keyboard, optical mouse, touch screen, etc...

[potlatch]

I knew a woman who worked at NASA in the 1960’s and she said the computer there filled a large room. I looked it up and she was right.

http://history.nasa.gov/computers/Computing.html

When the National Aeronautics and Space Administration came into existence in 1958, the stereotypical computer was the “UNIVAC,” a collection of spinning tape drives, noisy printers, and featureless boxes, filling a house-sized room.

[Terry Mross]

Who cares who invented it. It’s just a series of tubes according to Arlin Spechter.

[Traveler59]

Could you be referring to the newsgroups? Those were more like bulletin board messages. The Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was real-time chat long before AOL chat and some of these others. IRC was a black hole for me, I'd start into a chat area and come up for breath several hours later.

[bunkerhill7]

correct