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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."
"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
"Why exactly do we need to pay continual homage to Xerox?"
In this case, it's because Barack HUSSEIN Obama (D-Kenya) gave credit for the Internet to the gov't. So OF COURSE the Wall Street Journal has to contradict that claim because Barack HUSSEIN Obama can't be right about anything ever-- especially when it comes to claims that the gov't did something good.
If Obama said the sky was blue, the WSJ would undoubtedly publish a story questioning it. Why, just the other night the sky was pitch black! Is there nothing Obama won't lie to the American people about?
Perhaps because prior to Ethernet, most communications were either serial, or proprietary. They were the first standard and widely adopted interconnect protocol.
The whole point of the Arpanet layer model is that you could pop any transmission technology you wanted into layers 1 and 2 and you could still get connectivity over disparate networks, providing layers 3 and up could be made to work. Ethernet is certainly common in LANs, but considering you can't get more than 500 feet without boosting signal, it's an absurd claim to state that Ethernet was the start of the Internet.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I thought this was solved years ago when we all got together and gave Al Gore the credit?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Newton invented the outhouse (let's face it, outhouses would suck without gravity)
Yeah, I guess they would have to, wouldn't they?
- Newton invented the outhouse (let's face it, outhouses would suck without gravity)
Outhouses do suck without gravity.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
That's true now, but I'd invite you to go back and read the original Ethernet papers from PARC. They describe, among other things, a single (coax) wiring model, with support for up to 256 computers on a single broadcast domain sharing a 3Mb/s channel. Numerous parts of the specification are based on limits of the technology at the time, such as the number of RAM chips it was possible to fit on the board and the I/O speed of the Alto.
The evaluation paper on the Alto, published in 1979, points out that it's possible to imagine a network of thousands of personal computers.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Indeed.
The final answer is: Government invented the internet, no matter what the dangerously right-wing Wall Street Journal falsely believes.
Seriously, the WSJ loves business too much. It needs to learn that business are the MOST dependent on government. The richer you are, the more dependent you are on government, since a larger portion of your wealth derives from government activities.
A poor person does not need a highway system, schools, or an army. Poor people do not give a fuck.
A rich person needs a highway so their employees can get to work and deliver products to customers. They need schools so their employees can read instructions. They need armies to control resources. They need courts & police to enforce these rules.
ALL of government was designed to make people rich, and this is why we liberals tax the wealthy more than the poor. It used to be a nice 70% income tax rate for the rich, before Reagan gave all the dumbassess a false sense of hope that they too can be rich if they work hard. Um no, not everyone can be rich. Dumb people cannot be rich, no matter how hard they work. And, rich people need to pay the benefits of dumb people, so that they can continue to be rich.
The smaller government, the poorer the people. The bigger the government, the richer the people.
Meanwhile, the worst part is the SEO-optimized headline "Who really invented the internet" that'll cause Googlers to reach this page, falsely thinking that businesses somehow invented the internet. Someone really needs to un-SEO this article.
The poster has it wrong.
Surprise!
Robert W. Taylor was never the head of DARPA. He was, however, the guy who proposed and ran the ARPAnet for DARPA, under Director Charles Herzfeld, until he left to become head of Xerox PARC. (Although he got the idea while J.C.R. Licklider was head of DARPA, Taylor didn't pitch it as an actual, fundable project until Herzfeld took over.)
Taylor absolutely does NOT credit Robert Metcalfe (developer of Ethernet) for the invention of the Internet. Instead, he reserves the lion's share of the credit for himself. I know this, because he called me in 1994 to lecture me about what he felt were inaccuracies in a column I wrote for LAN Times about the origins of the Internet. (Specifically, he objected to my statement that the earlier RAND thought experiment on a nuclear-war-survivable, peer-based, packet-switched network was the basis for the development of the Internet.)
You can read more about Licklider, Taylor, and others who were responsible for the devleopment of the Internet in my December 2000 Boardwatch cover story "They Might Be Giants", if you're interested in the real story, as opposed to the WSJ's warm, stinky piece of journalistic shit.
Check out my novel.
So I have a question that maybe you can answer.
The vast majority of new businesses fail in this country. So if you have 2 businesses in a business park. One is wildly successful and the other goes bankrupt after a couple of years. The same road runs in front of both businesses. They both have the same mail service. They both have the same internet piped into their office suites. Who is PRIMARILY responsible for the business that succeeds? Is it the government or the owner?
www.joshferguson.org