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I'm surprised that the inventor of The Internet would make such erroneous claims.

Of all places, Slashdot really ought not to fall victim to such an erroneous meme.

What Al Gore actually said: "I took the initiative in creating the Internet."

"In all fairness, it's something Gore had worked on a long time. Gore is not the Father of the Internet, but in all fairness, Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet."
- Newt Gingrich, 2000

He didn't do that either. Al Gore was involved in the creation of NREN, the successor to Arpanet and NSFnet and the immediate predecessor to the commercialized Internet we have today. But the Internet already existed and had for several years, dating no later than 1983, with the creation of a gateway between Arpanet and CSnet.

Here is a pretty good "internet" timeline reference. Not much specific to web servers but does mention CERN and the first web server in 1991.

It seems the bulk of the article is bemoaning how ineffecient single processor systems are, offering Cray's planned adaptive model as a solution, but surely we've already seen the way forward in regard to supercomputing, and that is distributed single (or dual) processor machines. As stated at zakon.org, "SETI@Home launches on 17 May (2001) and within four weeks its distributed Internet clients provide more computing power than the most powerful supercomputer of its time"
Surely the computing environment hasn't changed so dramatically in 5 years as to make this type of achievement redundant?

Unless 'computing power' is different to 'combined processor speed', I don't understand what Cray are up to here.. perhaps someone can enlighten me?

To be exact, ARPANET switched from NCP to TCP/IP on January 1, 1983. NCP had a few shortcomings

• Like UDP, NCP had no way of handling lost packets. TCP introduced packet acknowledgement to fix this.
• NCP had no real routing. TCP/IP introduced the concept of gateways, routers, and independant networks/subnets.

The difference between IPv4 and IPv6? The size of the address space and the human representation of the addresses (hexadecimal instead of decimal).

While we're on the subject, it took over 8 years from the publication of Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn's A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection (May 1974), which described TCP, for ARPANET to incorporate TCP/IP.

It's also important to note that the size of the Internet in the 1980s was nothing like it is today. The Internet only had 562 hosts in August 1983, 8 months after the changeover. The same source states that the Internet had 353,284,187 hosts in July 2005. (Source: Hobbes' Internet Timeline, with data taken from Mark Lottor's zone program reports, and the ISC)

That's amazing considering the World Wide Web wasn't released by CERN until 1991 and Mosaic didn't even take off until 1993.

Get your facts straight.

Presuming you have enough language skill to know that "create" is not equal to "develop, nurture, and improve", which country did create it?

No one country did. That's exactly the point. For a start, the Internet is almost by definition a network of networks, many of which are not in the US. Moreover, there is no clear "creation date"; different aspects of what we know today as "the Internet" appeared at very different times in history.

What became today's Internet was mostly driven by academic research. While I'll certainly concede that much of the initial research during the '60s and early '70s happened in the US, it's still clear that from a very early stage, the research effort was international. For example, ISoc's brief history of the Internet mentions researchers in the UK working in parallel with the US research as early as 1967, until the groups discovered each other and started collaborating.

The infrastructure is obviously international, and for the most part quite capable of surviving without any one country. Networks that now form major parts of the Internet have existed in other countries for over 20 years. (The same history notes the existence of the JANET in the UK in 1984, while another mentions satellite links to Hawaii and the UK as early as 1975 and the creation of EUnet, connecting the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and UK, in 1982.)

The software side, in particular the established communications protocols for things like e-mail, WWW, Usenet or FTP communication, has come from diverse sources. What was effectively the first TCP/IP standard was presented to an international working group at Sussex University in the UK in 1973.

Bodies like the IETF and W3C have geographically diverse memberships. While the US has by far the largest single category of W3C membership today, it still represents less than 40% of the total, which isn't much more than Europe, for example. There are a total of 28 countries with member organisations.

For any one country, including the US, to claim that this whole picture developed because of it, or wouldn't have happened in a similar way without it, is simply a delusion of grandeur. It might not have happened as fast, or in exactly the same way, but it would still have happened, probably working off the research done in Europe.

I find it deeply ironic that one of the other replies to my GP post was an AC who claimed I was trolling, and challenged me to provide information about other countries that contributed to the Internet's creation, while another accuses me of rewriting history. Fortunately, while a lot of mostly US-based Internet history pages choose to ignore the contributions from outside and focus on the US academic network during the early stages, the kind of information above (all of which is written by the people and organisations at the heart of the Internet) is freely available, even to those in the US.

You were over 10 years late. http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/

I know it's probably not what the /.ed page was presenting, but it is something.
It has benn interesting to watch this over the years.

Uh, it was the government that financed the creation of (and thus "built") the first one. How are "we" going to afford to build one of our own? PayPal donations?

The Internet may have felt "free" but the infrastructure has always been owned by the government and private sectors.

UCLA was also, irnocially, very slow to get a Web site.

http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/

The internet has been international since 1973.
During the seventies and eighties a whole bunch of non military networks was interconnected that were not sponsored by the US.

The internet we came to know has very little to do with the original ARPA project besides its start and name.

Jeroen

It didn't die anymore than I died because I was so different in 1985. It grew up, just like everyone else. Beyond that, you seem to have some misinformation there.

Let's see, the Web (http) wasn't invented until 1991. While SLIP existed in 1985, the RFC wasn't written until 1988, and even then, it was something available primarily on commercial unix equipment. I think perhaps you meant gopher sites instead of finger sites (or maybe you meant finger servers, cause I've never heard of "finger sites" nor does the phrase make any sense). Even gopher didn't exist until the early 90's (maybe UMN was using it before that, but I doubt anyone else was).

As another poster pointed out, I would place this description of the Internet in the 1991-1993 time period, not 1985. Perhaps Hobbes' Internet timeline would help clear things up.
http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/

Indeed not. He was in the Senate. Like he said he was.

You're wrong on two counts.

First, the Senate is part of congress.

Second, Gore was in neither the Senate nor the House when the internet was "invented".

1966 - First APRANET plan

1969 - ARPANET commissioned by DoD for research into networking. First packets sent by Charley Kline at UCLA as he tried logging into SRI. The first attempt resulted in the system crashing as the letter G of LOGIN was entered. (October 29)

1970 - First publication of the original ARPANET Host-Host protocol

1972 - Ray Tomlinson (BBN) modifies email program for ARPANET

1973 - First international connections to the ARPANET

1974 - Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn publish "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection" which specified in detail the design of a Transmission Control Program (TCP)

1975 - Operational management of Internet transferred to DCA; "Jargon File", by Raphael Finkel at SAIL, first released

1976 - UUCP (Unix-to-Unix CoPy) developed at AT&T Bell Labs and distributed with UNIX one year later.

... and so on and so on ...

The above and more can be found at: http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/

Nov. 2, 1976 - Gore was elected to the first of four terms in the House.

Nov. 6, 1984 - Gore elected to Senate

I, of course, realize that there will still be some of you out there who think all the contributions prior to Al Gore's votes are irrelevant, but there you are.

I mean like Internet applications today, we had email, files, newsgroups, and chat across the nation using BBS's, while using DOS as the main os. Aka, an early version. ;)

Good Internet history can be found at zakon.org.

Actually, although it may have been a misstatement, it is grounded in some truth. Certainly, the internet as we have come to know it did not exist at that time.

Some other articles on this issue: 1 2

Read your history.

The point is, there is no real "ideology" per se regarding the Internet. It was a communications advancement, not a grand humanitarian vision.

My original post was attempting to combat the grandiose revisionist rhetoric that so many geeks are spewing forth about the Internet.

It's not a church. It's not the red cross.

It's a telecom network.

Perhaps you should check here or here and learn, once and for all, that Internet was not designed to withstand physical attacks. It just was a by-product.

Oh, lest I forget, ad hominem attacks take weight of your assertions (even more when they are not quite correct).

'til next post...

Marcos (any likeness to chance is pure reality)

Yeah, we wouldn't want the "gubmint" to do anything stupid and wasteful, like pay for the internet to be created and then pay for the internet to be publically available .

The Hobbes' Internet Timeline and the ISOC list of Internet Histories give much better coverage.

Then the internet is already dead. The internet started out as a US Government project (ARPANET) that was initially a response to Russia's Sputnik spacecraft. The goal was to research into methods of utilizing the Government's investment in computers. Of course, eventually, many of the resources were turned over to "special friends" who happened to win the bid to develop that resource. The internet eventually turned into what it is today. A good timeline can be found at this site

I don't think that Government involvement in the internet is a bad thing, as long as government influence doesn't get out of control (after all the internet turned out ok despite it's government orgins). In other words, things are not yet as bad as you say they could be. None the less, we need to make sure that our friends in the Government don't let the internet turn into a regulated forum. (ie. write/call your congressman!)

here. And yes, starting with Sputnik really does make sense, that little tin ball spurned more scientific research (and translation Russian services) that some people realize.

Hobbes' Internet Timeline

You know, of course, that the web was invented in Switzerland

Yes and it's completely irrellevant. the Internet sprang out from ARPANET. Read a little history. As you say http was developed at CERN an international laboratory located in switzerland. Does that mean that the swiss has the best web infrastructure in the world and the highest usage among it's population? And that the US r0olz when it comes to serving every other protocol? And how does that affect the french? The fact that someone (not a swiss afaik was in switzerland at the time he invented something vaguely like what we know as the web doesn't prove anything

And still no matter who invented the Internet doesn't matter in this context. Someone (possibly you, but you never know with ACs) made the claim that since the newspaper was japanese it was likely to get slashdotted. And the argument was that french newspaper wouldn't stand up to slashdotting. I made the point that france and japan are very different countries (culturally at least) and that what is (perhaps) true for france has nothing to do with japan.

Look at some statistics
There are 61.4 M japanese speaking internet users, compared to 230.6 M english speaking and 22.0 M french speakin
I think we can expect that one of Japan's biggest newspapers should withstand a little slashdotting if it can cope with any significant market share of 61.4 M potential visitors

Don't even know why I care to answer your stupid troll post.

Thank you and the same to you, if you have problems with me (or anyone) making a point about a stupid post you shouldn't be reading slashdot

In the meantime, our CAPITALIST markets helped create this thing called the Internet...

The Internet was created by the DOD, part of the evil statist socialist government. I guess it must be worthless then, not being created by the holiness of free enterprise.

Actually, according to this history of the Internet , the researchers involved were already working for Rand and DARPA.