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."

Comments

Al Gore

[Anonymous Coward]

'nuff said.

Re:twisted pair, twisted logic

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Barack's current position re: private enterprise is that, because government built a bridge over which drives shipping trucks, that therefore the economic might of the US is derived primarily, not secondarily (or tertiarily, most accurately -- government protecting property rights is secondarily) from government activity, and therefore is ethically justified in seizing ever-larger fractions of private enterprise, to lavish out on voters in exchange for votes.

This is fraud of the highest order.

Shame on the ignoranti for buying into it. Weaker, invention-wise, European nations buy into this fraud and suffer for it. If this theory were true, they should be in the lead of invention and advancement, per capita, but trail the US wildly in actual fact.

What you need to take away from the Internet issue is government kept a novelty alive via cash for a decade or two until private enterprise found a real use for it.

Only then did trillions of private money get dumped into it and did it stop being a snotty novelty for university professors.

In some decades space travel will explode with private money and interest. Jackassery will similarly claim NASA and government similarly played a huge role, and therefore are justified taking a huge chunk of those profits, too.

See, they invented space travel. They aren't just keeping a show novelty alive.