oh, but wait,,,there's more!

read on!



Several of the people who could claim to have "invented" the Internet, or key pieces of its protocols -- in particular, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn -- are out there on the Net today defending Gore, asserting that he was the politician in Washington who took the "initiative" to support the Net in its early days.

Implicit in their argument is a broader awareness of what it took to create the Internet. Anything as successful as the Net is not and cannot be successful as technology alone; technology does not exist in a vacuum. And just as the Internet required the services of brains like Kahn and Cerf and all the others who contributed code to its foundations, it also needed bureaucratic and legislative patrons.


It took social engineers as well as software engineers to build the Net. And that may be why the response to Gore's original statement was so savage: Not because his claim was a lie, but because it was a truth that a lot of people today are trying to forget or bury.

The Internet didn't spring full-blown out of some scientists' heads, nor did it just grow, like some techno-Topsy powered by the mysterious magic of the marketplace. It emerged from the world of government-subsidized university research, and every step of the way along its passage from academic network to global information infrastructure was shepherded by the state. As the Net's parent, the government didn't do everything right; but it managed to nurture the network through its youth -- then get out of the way once it was mature enough to move out of its parents' digs and shack up with private industry.

Libertarians and conservatives are uncomfortable admitting this. Their vision of Net history is a stirring saga of markets overwhelming states, technological imperatives vanquishing stifling bureaucracies and free information "routing around" government blockages. There's some truth in this vision -- but it's only part of the story.

The other part of the Net's history is a complex, and sometimes dull, chronicle of federal research grants, bureaucratic infighting and legislative initiatives that stitched together a messy but functional patchwork quilt of linked computers -- the famous "network of networks" that arose primarily in the 1980s, when the term "Internet" first came into play, and that remained a dark horse in the race to connect the public until around 1994.

Government alone couldn't have built today's Internet, but private industry, left to its own devices, wouldn't have, either. Without the critical spark of government-funded research lighting a fire of networked inventiveness, we'd probably have been stuck with the morass of competing proprietary online spaces that vied for the consumer's dollars in the early 1990s -- when AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, the prototypical MSN and other long-forgotten entrants like AT&T's Interchange and Apple's E-world all stared at each other across unbridgeable technological and business divides.

In those days the Internet was, we were told, too complex and geeky to ever reach the masses. That piece of conventional wisdom died a fast death as, one by one, the proprietary spaces folded or took down their walls and accepted that Internet connections were what people wanted.

Libertarians typically believe that the government can't do anything right, and they prefer to forget or ignore the part government has played in the Net's triumph. Giving Gore credit means admitting the government's role; distorting and mocking his claims helps deny it.

McCullagh, who is outspoken in his libertarian views, argues that, though he didn't use the word "invent," it is "a not entirely unreasonable paraphrase of the vice president's remarks," and suggests that the pro-Gore comments from Cerf may have a partisan basis: "I'm a big fan of Vint Cerf, and I think he's an able defender of the vice president, but let's put his defense of the vice president in context. Cerf is an executive at a large telecommunications company, and I suspect he acts more like a Washingtonian than a technologist nowadays. For instance, Cerf was a guest of honor at the White House's New Year's Eve gala, appeared with the president and first lady at an October 1999 White House 'Millennium Evening' lecture, and joined the president and vice president at a July 1997 event to introduce administration policy proposals."

Well, technologists do have a right to their political leanings, don't they? But the defense of Gore currently underway feels to me less like a party-line effort than like the repayment of a debt of gratitude by Internet pioneers who feel that Gore is being unfairly smeared.

That's what you'll hear from Phillip Hallam-Baker, a former member of the CERN Web development team that created the basic structure of the World Wide Web. Hallam-Baker calls the campaign to tar Gore as a delusional Internet inventor "a calculated piece of political propaganda to deny Gore credit for what is probably his biggest achievement."

"In the early days of the Web," says Hallam-Baker, who was there, "he was a believer, not after the fact when our success was already established -- he gave us help when it counted. He got us the funding to set up at MIT after we got kicked out of CERN for being too successful. He also personally saw to it that the entire federal government set up Web sites. Before the White House site went online, he would show the prototype to each agency director who came into his office. At the end he would click on the link to their agency site. If it returned 'Not Found' the said director got a powerful message that he better have a Web site before he next saw the veep."

That sounds like a pretty good description of the kind of "initiative" Gore claimed credit for in the first place. So the next time you hear an "Al Gore, Internet inventor" joke, think about the strange twisted path a politician's words can take in other people's hands -- and be glad we can use the Internet to try to straighten it out.


salon.com | Oct. 5, 2000

tell ya what miler,,,go watch the oscar nominated "inconvenient truth" that features nobel prize nominee al gore and get back to me. this is gettin boring goin round and round with ya

And as far as this goes , read this:

Warming Hype: 'Will Billions Die?' and 'Could Destroy Earth?' The networks on Wednesday, without any sense of any questions about the media-fueled scientific "consensus," continued their hyperbolic panic over the supposed dire threat of global warming. ABC's Good Morning America displayed this on-screen throughout a report from weather reader Sam Champion: "Will Billions Die from Global Warming?" Champion eagerly relayed how the upcoming report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) "will estimate that between 1.1 and 3.2 billion people will suffer from water shortage problems by 2080. That's not your grandchildren, that's your children. And between 200 million and 600 million more people will be going hungry." The IPCC's site: www.ipcc.ch Over on NBC's Today, co-host Matt Lauer warned of "a controversy in Washington over what literally could be the end of the world as we know it. Did the Bush administration freeze out scientists trying to sound the alarm on global warming?" CNN's Larry King Live on Wednesday night featured a panel under the on-screen heading: "Could Global Warming Destroy Earth?" Though the panel was dominated by left-wingers who endorse Al Gore's calls for drastic government action to curb human-caused warming, CNN, unlike the other networks, included one scientist, Robert Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences at MIT, who doesn't buy into the "consensus." Last July, he penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, "Don't Believe the Hype: Al Gore is wrong. There's no 'consensus' on global warming." An excerpt: ....Mr. Gore's preferred global-warming template -- namely, shrill alarmism. To believe it requires that one ignore the truly inconvenient facts. To take the issue of rising sea levels, these include: that the Arctic was as warm or warmer in 1940; that icebergs have been known since time immemorial; that the evidence so far suggests that the Greenland ice sheet is actually growing on average. A likely result of all this is increased pressure pushing ice off the coastal perimeter of that country, which is depicted so ominously in Mr. Gore's movie. In the absence of factual context, these images are perhaps dire or alarming. They are less so otherwise. Alpine glaciers have been retreating since the early 19th century, and were advancing for several centuries before that. Since about 1970, many of the glaciers have stopped retreating and some are now advancing again. And, frankly, we don't know why.... A general characteristic of Mr. Gore's approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse. Regardless, these items are clearly not issues over which debate is ended -- at least not in terms of the actual science. A clearer claim as to what debate has ended is provided by the environmental journalist Gregg Easterbrook. He concludes that the scientific community now agrees that significant warming is occurring, and that there is clear evidence of human influences on the climate system. This is still a most peculiar claim. At some level, it has never been widely contested. Most of the climate community has agreed since 1988 that global mean temperatures have increased on the order of one degree Fahrenheit over the past century, having risen significantly from about 1919 to 1940, decreased between 1940 and the early '70s, increased again until the '90s, and remaining essentially flat since 1998. There is also little disagreement that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen from about 280 parts per million by volume in the 19th century to about 387 ppmv today. Finally, there has been no question whatever that carbon dioxide is an infrared absorber (i.e., a greenhouse gas -- albeit a minor one), and its increase should theoretically contribute to warming. Indeed, if all else were kept equal, the increase in carbon dioxide should have led to somewhat more warming than has been observed, assuming that the small observed increase was in fact due to increasing carbon dioxide rather than a natural fluctuation in the climate system. Although no cause for alarm rests on this issue, there has been an intense effort to claim that the theoretically expected contribution from additional carbon dioxide has actually been detected. Given that we do not understand the natural internal variability of climate change, this task is currently impossible. Nevertheless there has been a persistent effort to suggest otherwise, and with surprising impact. Thus, although the conflicted state of the affair was accurately presented in the 1996 text of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the infamous "summary for policy makers" reported ambiguously that "The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." This sufficed as the smoking gun for Kyoto.... Even more recently, the Climate Change Science Program, the Bush administration's coordinating agency for global-warming research, declared it had found "clear evidence of human influences on the climate system." This, for Mr. Easterbrook, meant: "Case closed." What exactly was this evidence? The models imply that greenhouse warming should impact atmospheric temperatures more than surface temperatures, and yet satellite data showed no warming in the atmosphere since 1979. The report showed that selective corrections to the atmospheric data could lead to some warming, thus reducing the conflict between observations and models descriptions of what greenhouse warming should look like. That, to me, means the case is still very much open. So what, then, is one to make of this alleged debate? I would suggest at least three points. First, nonscientists generally do not want to bother with understanding the science. Claims of consensus relieve policy types, environmental advocates and politicians of any need to do so. Such claims also serve to intimidate the public and even scientists -- especially those outside the area of climate dynamics. Secondly, given that the question of human attribution largely cannot be resolved, its use in promoting visions of disaster constitutes nothing so much as a bait-and-switch scam. That is an inauspicious beginning to what Mr. Gore claims is not a political issue but a "moral" crusade. Lastly, there is a clear attempt to establish truth not by scientific methods but by perpetual repetition. An earlier attempt at this was accompanied by tragedy. Perhaps Marx was right. This time around we may have farce -- if we're lucky.

keep jawin with no facts...it's transparent son.

yes, and that is exactly what the facts show...and he never said "i invented the internet" as you bogusly claim. your point?

i did, and you are dead wrong...keep diggin miler!

McCullagh, who is outspoken in his libertarian views, argues that, though he didn't use the word "invent," it is "a not entirely unreasonable paraphrase of the vice president's remarks," and suggests that the pro-Gore comments from Cerf may have a partisan basis: "I'm a big fan of Vint Cerf, and I think he's an able defender of the vice president, but let's put his defense of the vice president in context. Cerf is an executive at a large telecommunications company, and I suspect he acts more like a Washingtonian than a technologist nowadays. For instance, Cerf was a guest of honor at the White House's New Year's Eve gala, appeared with the president and first lady at an October 1999 White House 'Millennium Evening' lecture, and joined the president and vice president at a July 1997 event to introduce administration policy proposals."

Well, technologists do have a right to their political leanings, don't they? But the defense of Gore currently underway feels to me less like a party-line effort than like the repayment of a debt of gratitude by Internet pioneers who feel that Gore is being unfairly smeared.

That's what you'll hear from Phillip Hallam-Baker, a former member of the CERN Web development team that created the basic structure of the World Wide Web. Hallam-Baker calls the campaign to tar Gore as a delusional Internet inventor "a calculated piece of political propaganda to deny Gore credit for what is probably his biggest achievement."

"In the early days of the Web," says Hallam-Baker, who was there, "he was a believer, not after the fact when our success was already established -- he gave us help when it counted. He got us the funding to set up at MIT after we got kicked out of CERN for being too successful. He also personally saw to it that the entire federal government set up Web sites. Before the White House site went online, he would show the prototype to each agency director who came into his office. At the end he would click on the link to their agency site. If it returned 'Not Found' the said director got a powerful message that he better have a Web site before he next saw the veep."

That sounds like a pretty good description of the kind of "initiative" Gore claimed credit for in the first place. So the next time you hear an "Al Gore, Internet inventor" joke, think about the strange twisted path a politician's words can take in other people's hands -- and be glad we can use the Internet to try to straighten it out.

From Dictionary.com:

cre·ate /kriˈeɪt/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[kree-eyt] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation verb, -at·ed, -at·ing, adjective
–verb (used with object) 1. to cause to come into being, as something unique that would not naturally evolve or that is not made by ordinary processes.
2. to evolve from one's own thought or imagination, as a work of art or an invention.

Note the bolded word.

Game set and match to Doc. You lose (again - seems to be a habit for you) Sean.

in·i·tia·tive (ĭ-nĭsh'ə-tĭv)
n.
The power or ability to begin or to follow through energetically with a plan or task; enterprise and determination.
A beginning or introductory step; an opening move: took the initiative in trying to solve the problem.

The power or right to introduce a new legislative measure.

of course if you only isolate "create" you can skew and spin...but the KEYword is "initiative." which, as you see above, is exactly what al did.

he took the "initiative" (the orig. piece of legisation that allowed for it's development) in creating the internet.

no it wasn't. people began developing networks in the 60's (actually before 69) but they were diliberately done in different languages and not compatable with each other. the main use was intelligence, and what was the point if just anyone could access it was their point

the 1st time we had any kind of "global network" was via Cerf and Kahn in 83. but the 1st actual 'web server" came in 91.

From the 1960s the US government, in partnership with some key universities, began exploring the potential of networking computers. There were half a dozen of these networks by the late 70s, all talking to different users and often in deliberately different languages. After all, what was the value in making something like Arpanet - designed to protect Western intelligence against a Soviet nuclear strike - available to the wider world?



keep diggin! what i said was entirely true..you just keep feelin that need "to get me" on something...anything! grow up boy.

but i guess you'd rather continue the hijack of this fine article with arguing nonsense. WWW Link

You should do a little more reading "before" you challenge a national IT manager.

the dilbert principle comes to mind. and by the way, while you are getting everyone drinks, i'd love a grasshopper!

Wrong again. The internet started out as a one country affair. But it was still the internet. And the internet did not rely on web servers in its infancy. They did come later, but did nto make it the Internet.

You love being wrong, dont you.

Gore lied, and you bought his lie. Congratulations. You are now officially a member of the mind numbed gorebots.

SConn1, you can talk "all" the bs you want but you're still wrong and everyone here knows it.

While you're at it....go look up the meanings of the MCS's I quoted you and thenm start by reading " The Complete Internet Reference by Osbourne" OR "The Internet for Dummies" book. Then come back and we'll have a "rational" discussion.

Match point. hardly, lmfao! you still have yet to even dispute anything i said. Ever heard of DARPA (which began in "1959")? That was the beginning of the INTERNET and the computers ALL spoke the SAME language. Wrong here too. By 1973 DARPA had them all talking kind of a contradiction isn't it? how could they have "had them all talking by 73" if they already were in 59 as you claimed? pklus, your quote (which does not cite it's references or sources) doesn't even say 1973...NONSENSE! and neither dispute what i said about ARPANET. which was entirely true

You haven't said "one true" thing since we started on this subject.

Wrong here too. By 1973 DARPA had them all talking. None of which Gore had "anything" to do with. Also from wikipedia:

I also note you skipped this entirely!

And just for your edification...ARPANET is a derivative of DARPA!