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Who Really Invented the Internet?
jaymzter writes "The Wall Street Journal is running an article that it claims seeks to dispel an urban legend about the internet: 'The creation of the Arpanet was not motivated by considerations of war. The Arpanet was not an Internet.' The position of the piece is that it was Xerox's contribution of Ethernet that enabled the global series of tubes we know and love today, and what's interesting is that the former head of DARPA supports this claim."
A general wiring specification is hardly on a level playing field with creating the internet. That's like saying Xerox's mouse created the PC. A nice piece of the puzzle perhaps, but not credit-worthy.
Why exactly do we need to pay continual homage to Xerox? To create more urban legends instead of dispel and dismiss them?
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
"See, it was never the government who created the Internet. The Free Market (peace be upon it) did it all by its lonesome!".
Color me shocked that a Murdoch paper's using that line.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Every generation of teenagers thinks they invented sex and music.... and the internet.
We used to laugh at "al gore invented the internet" but the next generation of people will laugh at "zuckerberg invented the internet"
The other problem is there is no "internet". No one thing you can point at. Who invented "the space shuttle" as one individual inventing one object is an equally dumb question.
Another problem is best displayed by analogy. Who invented God? There's 10000 religions all saying they did, and the other 9999 got it all wrong and the 9999 others are all going to hell. Odds are all 10000 got it wrong not just 9999. Or another great analogy, at least to educated people: Who caused the decline and fall of the roman empire?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
How about this: it was thousands of individuals, working both in the public and private sector on different pieces of the puzzle, when all taken together, who developed the Internet.
And then it gets crazier: if any of those pieces were missing, the same problems would have been present, and they would have been solved in similar but slightly different ways. If not for ARPANET, perhaps Project Xanadu would have yielded a working model, and something like IP would have been developed to make the networking work.
And to top it off: regardless, the state of the Internet at any particular point is largely a function of the available computing power. Moore's Law is highly resistant to challenge, and it's unlikely that any major change of players would have affected the outcome much. My BBS'ing days on a C=64 with a 300-baud modem might have had hypertext in the Xanadu model, but it still would have been an 8-bit experience.
In summary: there are stupid questions, like "who really invented the Internet?"
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
He just made it available to everyone, which is what the free market does. If this had not happened, the Government would have been perfectly happy to continue being the exclusive user of the net. The market has always worked to make products available to as many people as possible. Governments have always worked to served themselves.
"is no better than Fox News"
Isn't it interesting how you just assume that everyone agrees with you.
You do understand that FNC consistently has the highest ratings of the lot don't you?
The truth, therefore, is that you are in the minority. How do you like that?
http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/category/ratings
It did not start to grow "MASSIVELY" until private industry got into it. There were not even ISPs then, because they were private industry. Just shut up and watch your compuserv.
It didn't start to grow "massively" until it was popularized by the World Wide Web. Who invented that? An Englishman working at that well known bastion of free market Americana: CERN in Switzerland.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
1) "The Internet" was invented by Vint Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine who worked for Stanford University and issued RFC 675 "SPECIFICATION OF INTERNET TRANSMISSION CONTROL PROGRAM", and they were funded by ARPA.
2) Lots of other people and organizations developed lots of networks. ARPANET between University of California, Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute (funded by ARPA). There was also privately operated Telenet & Tymnet, and university lead MERIT networks as well as UUCP started at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
3) I worked for one of the first private Internet Service Providers - tt was also one of the first providers of dial-up shell accounts, and later had one of the first national DS-3 IP networks. When I started cold-calling people for web design, they often told me "My customers will never use the Internet" (if they even knew what the Internet was). Suffice it to say that a lot of very forward-looking private providers of capital made that company possible, and they all made a lot of money in the process, and that turned the Internet from something you tinkered with at University into something real.
Also look at private companies like Cisco that made IP routing practical at large scales.
So I will 100% agree that government funding of university researchers created the Internet. However it would have never gone anywhere without private money funding a massive expansion and buildout of it.
Think university solar cell research funded by the government - good. Solyndra funded by government - bad.
And it would have also gone NOWHERE if government tried to regulate early ISPs as roughly as it regulated the incumbent telecommunications companies. We could do pretty much whatever we wanted with little regulation or censorship.