Posted on 07/23/2012 7:06:51 AM PDT by Pharmboy
Contrary to legend, it wasn't the federal government, and the Internet had nothing to do with maintaining communications during a war.
A telling moment in the presidential race came recently when Barack Obama said: "If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." He justified elevating bureaucrats over entrepreneurs by referring to bridges and roads, adding: "The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all companies could make money off the Internet."
It's an urban legend that the government launched the Internet. The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communications lines up even in a nuclear strike. The truth is a more interesting story about how innovation happens—and about how hard it is to build successful technology companies even once the government gets out of the way.
For many technologists, the idea of the Internet traces to Vannevar Bush, the presidential science adviser during World War II who oversaw the development of radar and the Manhattan Project....
...by the 1960s technologists were trying to connect separate physical communications networks into one global network—a "world-wide web." The federal government was involved, modestly, via the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Its goal was not maintaining communications during a nuclear attack, and it didn't build the Internet. Robert Taylor, who ran the ARPA program in the 1960s, sent an email to fellow technologists in 2004 setting the record straight: "The creation of the Arpanet was not motivated by considerations of war. The Arpanet was not an Internet. An Internet is a connection between two or more computer networks."
If the government didn't invent the Internet, who did?
(Excerpt) Read more at professional.wsj.com ...
This is a free piece at The Journal, so click through. Short, with some great facts.
well, actually the internet WAS in fact a DOD thing. I remember when we first started using it; I was a Captain in the Army in the early 80s. It was very clunky and weird to use
HA! I should have anticipated that...that dude’s pic never fails to make me smile.
And you can say the DOD was heavily involved in creating the computer itself
But, it was private individuals who made it small enough and powerful enough and fast enought so that you could view porn at home
Judas Priest, I am a female and a very serious Catholic I am not viewing any porn, unlike most
“the idea of the Internet traces to Vannevar Bush”
So, in this case we CAN say, “Bush did it.”
I love that quote.
One of the top BS lines in history.
I don't watch porn either, but this still made me guffaw. Its probably how many people do think about the 'net.
Read the article, it really was Bush’s fault!
Of course there was no one "inventor" of the Internet, nor a single development that created it, however the original project by DARPA, and the protocols developed by BBN were what morphed into the Internet we all know and Freep by.
Mark
"It's important to understand the history of the Internet because it's too often wrongly cited to justify big government."
A very interesting read, thanks!
But full credit goes to the company where Mr. Taylor worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox. It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks. Researchers there also developed the first personal computer (the Xerox Alto) and the graphical user interface that still drives computer usage today.This is my understanding of it. I've know about this from other sources for decades.
It is amazing at just how many technical innovations and their implementation into common usage have been driven by porn.
And cats.
But mostly porn.
Mark
AutoVON?
*** Even though we now borrow much of it, in the end, Americans who are private citizens will pay for it. In the end, no matter wht Obama and the Dems say, private citizens pay for gov, through money earned from business. PS- I did read the article...
SO.......Bush invented the internet....Vannevar Bush.
“In the early 80’s”
Yep, I remember that time. I built my first PC in 1982.
Ran with some really great techs then. Most of them worked for the labs near where I lived in NM.
In the mid-late 80s, when desktop computers became popular, BBS [Bulletin Board Systems] sprang up in all major cities. They included chat, downloads, forums. BBS’s connected home computers via a BBS center.
The ‘internet’ was not really available to the general public until about 1994. [My first experience on it was in late 1995. My first internet chat — in Fort Worth — was with a guy in Australia. I was in awe to be ‘chatting’ with someone half-way around the world in almost real time.]
ISPs and connection options blossumed during the next few years.
I recall that SWBell in Ft. Worth didn’t want to upgrade their telephone lines [residential Internet was dial-up, because cable TV providers had not entered the market yet]. SWBell official thought the internet was just a passing fad. In a couple of years (late 90s), the phone line connections were crowded — with landline phone, fax, and dial-up.
wow, yes, absolutely!!!!!!! I hadn’t thought about that word in years
However even more key to the Internet is computer technology. Again entrepreneurs and private companies made the first integrated circuits (Fairchild Semiconductor), IBM and Xerox gave us the PC architecture and the basis for a windows graphic users interface and of course Bill Gates and Steven jobs were not government bureaucrats either.
Obama's assertion that the government invented the internet is as bogus as his birth certificate.
yeah, the reason for the creation was for government use. That private industry was able to make use of it indicates the creativity of private industry, nothing more. Government doesn’t create things for private industry.
DARPA, wasn’t it?
This is no different than Dear Leader's WHOPPER that "Ramadan" has been "observed" in the White House since Jefferson held the first "Iftar" dinner 200 years ago and gave the impression that this has been an ongoing "practice" ever since.
Complete and utter Bovine Excrement!!!
Jefferson NEVER held an "Iftar" dinner and it wasn't until our clueless, dupe and naive, "Compassionate Conservative" (Boosh) that the observance of Ramadan in the WH (to prove that Islam was/is a "Religion of Pieces") began as an annual event.
If my memory can function, it started out early 80`s, `90`s as it was all BBS`s and newsgroup protocols and using GOPHER archive search engine out of Univ. of Wisconsin at the local library.
Too bad the article doesn’t answer the question of exactly who invented the world wide interweb ethernet thingy.
Bush did it?
What about Alexander Graham Bell, Marconi and Wernher Von Braugn. Edison and so many others. All of them built the foundation of what we call the internet. Tim Berners-Lee is credited with inventing the world wide web.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee
For good or evil, porn has driven web innovation like nothing else has. In the early days, mid 90’s, we would log into to porn sites just to see how they were pushing the technology envelope.
Do you remember when the internet community chastised a user for trying to sell his computer or something in his messages? The meme back then was powerful: The internet will never be used for commerce of any kind.
:-P
You are making think then, that the internet is evil. I will probably start weaning myself off of it and go back to just using my computer for word processing.
If the government didn't invent the Internet, who did? Vinton Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol, the Internet's backbone, and Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for hyperlinks.
AND I remember there was a big debate about free software vs purchased.
Bflr
I was using Prodigy to follow the Persian Gulf War in ‘90-’91. Clunky, slow, but the basics of the internet were all there.
YDBT!
Actually, porn was what kick started VCR movie’s. It was porn that kick started computers and CD-Roms. It is porn that was the leading edge of internet commerce.
Porn is huge with men. Back in the mid 1990’s I was considered a “computer guru” by most of the folks in my church (about 1,500 attending members. They would always call on me if they were having computer problems.
Anyway, even with church deacons, it was interesting to sort their internet history by file size and check out the jpg’s. Usually you didn’t even have to open files called “Hotcoedsbambi.jpg” and such to get the idea.
My wife worked at a catholic college in a midwestern state when we were dating. She would comment on how hard the boys worked in the computer lab on their assignments. So I flew out there one day and she was showing me around. We got to the computer lab and I noticed the layout included a string of five or six computers who’s monitors faced the back wall. I asked her if that was where the boys were working until the wee hours of the morning. She said yes.
We walked up to one of them and I showed here the internet temporary files library, sorted by file size. I showed her the file names (See name above for name type) and opened one file. This was in the days where the image slowly paints from top to bottom. We got about halfway down before she told me to close it.
All the files had a time stamp later than 11:00 PM.
The school closed the computer lab after 10:00 after she brought it to their attention.
Men are susceptible to porn. All men who have not been castrated, that is. And the internet has caused porn to become a major factor in the lives of most males over the age of 13. It is having an impact on our culture, but it will get much, MUCH worse, and in ways nobody has anticipated. You can bank on it.
Porn breaks up marriages and hurts women and children. It is of satan
Did you read the article?
Actually that is not correct. Four Universities kept it alive and you could dial in (via long distance!) to the system.
(I am painfully aware of this because one of my employees ran up a $93 phone bill in in 1987 doing just that! My wife wanted to fire him but I convinced her to let him pay it back.)
“In the Beginning, ARPA created the ARPANET.
And the ARPANET was without form and void.
And darkness was upon the deep.
And the spirit of ARPA moved upon the face of the network and ARPA said, ‘Let there be a protocol,’ and there was a protocol. And ARPA saw that it was good.
And ARPA said, ‘Let there be more protocols,’ and it was so. And ARPA saw that it was good.
And ARPA said, ‘Let there be more networks,’ and it was so.”
— Danny Cohen
This Internet Timeline begins in 1962, before the word ‘Internet’ is invented. The world’s 10,000 computers are primitive, although they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. They have only a few thousand words of magnetic core memory, and programming them is far from easy.
Domestically, data communication over the phone lines is an AT&T monopoly. The ‘Picturephone’ of 1939, shown again at the New York World’s Fair in 1964, is still AT&T’s answer to the future of worldwide communications.
But the four-year old Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense, a future-oriented funder of ‘high-risk, high-gain’ research, lays the groundwork for what becomes the ARPANET and, much later, the Internet.
By 1992, when this timeline ends,
the Internet has one million hosts
the ARPANET has ceased to exist
computers are nine orders of magnitude faster
network bandwidth is twenty million times greater.
I remember accessing university sites in the 70’s via the old phone modems, and continually upgraded modems and chatted all over the world and had email, via a university server, in the early 90’s. All of my work for took place via phones and either interfaced with local BBS types or university for newsgroups and emails.
I don’t actually remember being assigned an IP address until much later.
The first browser I used in the early 90’s stored the graphic symbols on my computer rather and the what was transmitted was instructions and text. I remember the upgrades of loading additional graphics files / symbols. I wish I could remember the name of the “browser”.
What amazes me is how “simple” it all turned out. At the time I started using this and implementing this stuff it was very hard to do reliably.
Also Celluloid Movies, VCR Video Recorders, MPEG and JPEG compressions, and many other technologies
got to admit no
I heard years ago that DARPA bought the data packet switching idea from someone, I think a university professor.
and the article may be a perspective, but I recall when the DOD did what they did and the article (which I have now read but don’t regard as gospel) leaves the DOD out.
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