A Brief History of the Internet 285
Ant writes "'Many young people around the world use the internet every day, and yet they have no memory of the history that led to the creation of the global network. Many have no understanding of how or why the internet has developed. As part of out continuing efforts to combat ignorance around the world, The Lemon is proud to present this timeline...'"
Al Gore did not invent the internet. (Score:2, Insightful)
He rode the wave (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:He rode the wave (Score:3, Insightful)
Ya gotta stop getting you news from Jay Leno & that boring Rush guy.
Re:Gore claimed to have invented it (Score:4, Informative)
But in the only sense that matters for a politition, he did create the Internet. Senator Gore (or rather some unnamed staffer) wrote the legislation that created NSFNET back when DARPA was chasing everyone without military connections off the ARPANET (resulting in the MILNET). Thus was born the backbone of the Internet. He also wrote the continuing legislation that funded the NSF backbone for the five or six years it took to become self-sufficent. This was no mean feat; contrary to the grandparent post that claims he was just riding a wave of support, there was a lot of opposition and cries of wasted taxpayer money. (Eventually those cries were right -- funding lasted a couple years longer than it probably needed to.) It wasn't until after Netscape's success that VCs started lining up with funding and the real "wave" began. The perception that the Internet was a desirable thing was quite uncommon thirteen years ago even if it seems perfectly obvious to us now.
He rode the wave in 1986, eh? (Score:4, Informative)
Check this out. You might learn something.
Al Gore and the Creation of the Internet" [firstmonday.dk]
As you'll see, Gore made his first proposal to fund a universal version of the internet in 1986. How many other politicians, people not usually known for being up to date with technology, were pushing the internet in 1986? Were you?
This article puts 1986 into perspective:
"That Gore wrote about a national "data highway" as far back as 1986 is extremely significant. It is important to make clear the context of the state of computing at that time. The IBM PC was only four years old. The Apple II computer was still in widespread use. The number of hosts on the Internet numbered, as counted by Mark Lottor's Internet Domain Survey, was 5,089. Entire universities (such as Michigan State University) made their initial connection to the Internet in 1986. In order for Gore to make this kind of speech in 1986, he had to have been conversant with the thinking of computer scientists and Internet pioneers. Such pioneers included such as Vint Cerf, Steven Wolf, and Larry Smarr - then director of the National Center for Supercomputer Applications at the University of Illinois (NCSA), where Mosaic would be born some seven years later."
Did you get that, bunky? Seven years before Mosaic. Is that what you call "riding the wave"?
Speaking of Vinton Cerf, who might be trusted to have an informed opinion on this, this is what he had to say about Gore:
Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development.
No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community. But as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.
Last year the Vice President made a straightforward statement on his role. He said: "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet." We don't think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he "invented" the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening. We feel it is timely to offer our perspective.
As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship. Though easily forgotten, now, at the time this was an unproven and controversial concept. Our work on the Internet started in 1973 and was based on even earlier work that took place in the mid-late 1960s. But the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication. As an example, he sponsored hearings on how advanced technologies might be put to use in areas like coordinating the response of government agencies to natural disasters and other crises.
As a Senator in the 1980s Gore urged government agencies t
Re:He rode the wave in 1986, eh? (Score:2, Informative)
- nuff said.
Re:He rode the wave in 1986, eh? (Score:2)
Uh, nice, but NO (Score:2)
I'm sure that is some comfort.
Fact is, had Al not sponsored some legislation, 434 other reps would have. Al just got out in front of the wave. He showed no insight (if he had, he would have been sponsoring it 10 years prior). He showed no courage ("Internet good!" was never cotroversial). And for him to say he invented the internet is the same as Bush claiming that he figured out that Saddam was a bad guy.
Al was not reponsible for anything other
Turn off Rush and go to Google (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Al Gore did not invent the internet. (Score:5, Funny)
Haven't you heard it's all based on Al-Gore-ithms?
Re:Al Gore did not invent the internet. (Score:5, Funny)
A History of the BRIEF Internet... (Score:5, Funny)
The rest, as they say, is history.
It all started in 1927 ... (Score:5, Funny)
It took me years to figure out what he meant.
Damn those corporate drones in middle management.
Re:It all started in 1927 ... (Score:2)
And who's the shady character you met? I suspect it could've been Pop Gates or even Grandpa Gates
The history of Usenet... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The history of Usenet... (Score:2, Funny)
Hopefully his imagination has improved over the years... If not, he's probably just as fed-up as me.
And (Score:5, Funny)
That's a funny site :)
Billy G (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Billy G (Score:4, Insightful)
And he's getting pretty good at it, too.
Re:Billy G (Score:2)
well... (Score:2, Funny)
I still don't get the "lemon" part though... all they talk about is apple, nothing sour in that ;)
How was the 'net invented (Score:2, Funny)
How pathetic is this? (Score:5, Insightful)
1992 - World-Wide Web released by CERN. Group suggests someone invent a web browser so people can use it.
Bill Gates gets a mention (although not a positive one) but Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web doesn't? How bad is that?
It amazes me that Berners-Lee isn't more widely acknowledged for his contribution to today's internet. Granted he's never been a man who's to court publicity, but he will go down in history as one of the most influential figures of the 20th century.
Arguably, he's been as important to the information revolution as Gutenberg was to the printing one. I'm not saying that he created everything single-handedly, only that his work should be acknowledged.
Yes, I realise that the The Lemon timeline is meant to be jokey but shouldn't a guy who's made so much possible for so many - for geeks the world over to argue with each other over which edition of AD&D is the best, people who've never had a social life to order a bride without leaving their front rooms and teenagers everywhere to download more porn than their Dad's could ever have imagined - get at least a tip of the hat?
Re:How pathetic is this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hrmmm... his invention certainly is influential, but not him. Influence is a showing of the pervasity, and profound changes from something. If that something is a single event, then it must be fundamentaly different, and destroy the prior 'world': Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Marx' theory of class struggle (good and bad).
TBL's "hypertext", while certainly a fantastic insight and construct, built upon endless hours of conceptualisation by the Arpanet team concerning distributed data. Also, hypertext didn't "destroy" anything, it merely added another medium.
Just as Philo T. Farnsworth "invented" television, would you have remembered his name? Is he up there with Einstein, Woodrow Wilson? Kennedy?
"Destructive" history, inventing the television (Score:5, Insightful)
What did the Apollo moon landings destroy? Or climbing Mount Everest? Or the creation of the Olympic movement? Or Pasteur's work in medicine?
I'm sorry, but I don't see how something has to be destructive, even in the loosest sense of the word as you're applying it, to be either influential or historical.
Oh, and as for just who "invented" the television, well, that's a real can of worms you've opened there. Farnsworth? George Carey? W. E. Sawyer? Edwin Belin? Vladimir Kosma Zworykin? John Logie Baird? Denes von Mihaly? Take your pick.
Farnsworth's showed off his technology on September 7, 1927. Baird's first public demonstration (to the general public in a department store) was on March 25, 1925, and he had a working model a year earlier.
Of all the pioneers who can claim to have invented the television, Farnsworth's claim isn't the strongest. But, obviously, because he was American he's the one Americans credit.
Sir Francis Drake (Score:2)
It was Sir Francis Drake, who circumcized the world with a 100 foot clipper.
You can find this and more amazing history facts at:
this guy's messy blog [thechristianmarketer.com].
Re:How pathetic is this? (Score:4, Insightful)
The www has revolutionnised the World of on-line information. It's made it infinitely more accessible and at the same time set computer-human interface design back 20 years
BTW Einstein's theories of relativity have had almost zero influence on the World. It has no practical applications that I can think of off hand (maybe interplanetary space probes?). The other great scientific theory of the 20th century - quantum mechanics - otoh pervades our every day life. I always think it is fitting that Einstein received the Nobel prize for his description of the photo electric effect (part of quantum mechanics), not relativity since in the long run it has turned out to be far more important.
Re:How pathetic is this? (Score:2, Informative)
One application that I happen to know about is our GPS system, whose satelites rely on the general theory of relativity to give accurate results. Read all about it here [ohio-state.edu].
Perhaps ignorance about this kind of thing is a result of misunderstanding what exactly relativity is... my high school physics teacher told me that he didn
Re:How pathetic is this? (Score:2)
Not only that, but general and special relativity also are fundamental to quite a few other theories.
As for what work Einstein got his Nobel, I'm not entirely sure, but iirc, the reason why he got it for his work on photons was because relativity wasn't proven at the time. But I'm not entirely sure about that...
Re:How pathetic is this? (Score:2)
Remeber gopher, or archie? Two software tools very much in use by the geeks prior to html/http and now both are dead.
Re:How pathetic is this? (Score:2)
The biography, written by Farnsworth's wife, is one of the most boring books in existence. Imag
Uh, Farnsworth? (Score:2)
Ex-squeeze me? John Logie Baird demonstrated the first television at the Royal Institute several months before Farnsworth ever completed his.
Re:How pathetic is this? (Score:2)
And that is why he's the man.
Re:How pathetic is this? (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess when it comes to fame it helps to be:
A. Wealthy
B. American
C. Become more wealthy as time goes on.
Sorry Tim, not to mention Marc Andreessen.
Re:How pathetic is this? (Score:2)
But secondly, MS didn't steal PC-Dos from IBM. They bought it from some hacker for $70. They then turned around and licensed it to IBM. It still stands as the biggest raping of suits by geeks.
Cats (Score:3, Informative)
"Cats becomes sole proprietor of all your base. Every Zig moved."
Re:Cats (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, if Tim Berners-Lee had only held on to his "world wide web" then we'd probably all be speaking his name now...
No. If TBL had "held on to" the WWW, nobody would ever had heard of it, or him. One of the major benefits of the WWW is that it is open for anybody to write browsers, servers, or run websites. If TBL had ever tried to exert control, the WWW would have been dropped instantly. Licensing was one of the things that killed gopher.
Re:How pathetic is this? (Score:2)
Re:How pathetic is this? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How pathetic is this? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How pathetic is this? (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
For god sakes dont forget the BBSes (Score:2, Funny)
Who knew?
Re:For god sakes dont forget the BBSes (Score:5, Insightful)
And if you were real lucky, you had a good selection in your local calling area.
Ah, those were the days...
Speaking of Computer Shopper ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:For god sakes dont forget the BBSes (Score:2)
And 300 baud works pretty well until you try to get into a Teleconference on a multi-line BBS, since with more than 2 or 3 people talking you never have a chance to get a word in edgewise. Worked fine at faster speeds though.
FidoNet was an amazing concept. Send somebody on another BBS an e-mail message from your BBS, and they'd receive it within a day or two (when the BBSes would call each other and
Re:For god sakes dont forget the BBSes (Score:2, Interesting)
Hobbes' Internet Timeline and ISOC History (Score:5, Informative)
The Hobbes' Internet Timeline [zakon.org] and the ISOC list of Internet Histories [isoc.org] give much better coverage.
Re:Hobbes' Internet Timeline and ISOC History (Score:5, Insightful)
#2) It's a humor article, not an official document
#3) Dates are made up for most part, because *gasp* see #2
Thank you. Come again.
Al Gore's Internet (Score:5, Informative)
Seth Finkelstein has collected lots of good links on the topic.
Re:Al Gore's Internet (Score:2)
Are you sure? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Are you sure? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Are you sure? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Are you sure? (Score:4, Funny)
No, it was shipped with the Plus! upgrade to Windows 95. The internet was $50 extra.
This is news??? (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously, this has to be one of the most useless and uninteresting items to appear on Slashdot in the recent past. A real history of the internet? Maybe that would be an interesting read. But this garbage from The Lemon is completely worthless, not even funny (it tries, yet fails miserably), and unworthy of even a mention on Fark [fark.com].
I found it funny (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This is news??? (Score:2, Funny)
I thought it was hillarious. (Score:2)
Funny stuff for those who can lighten up.
Funny, but badly researched... (Score:5, Insightful)
1977: email invented. most common message: "let me know when you are there so i can call you.
(Family archives show as #1: "did you get this [email]?" and "are you there ?")
1978: Spreadsheet, 10 years till anyone knows how to use them.
(Show me one person who has a usefull use for spreadsheets
1995: AOL, Compuserve, etc take off
(I canceled my CIS account in late 1995, after using it for quite a while.
Erm - shute, I wanted to, but I didn't....)
1995: Release of Windows'95
(Erm
1997: Internet Porn introduced to businesses. Worker productivity down 97%
('97? I could swear Admiral K. sold his stuff for websites long before that [ESCdd])
2001: Blogging invented.
(hey, my first lj-entry is Aug 29th, 2000 - and I joined the bandwaggon very late.)
ps:
semicolon-dash-closing bracket
Re:Funny, but badly researched... (Score:3, Informative)
Accountants. Spreadsheets were not invented on a computer; accountants and other money-men had been using actual peices of paper with grids on them, called spreadsheets, long before the display of an Apple ][ was carved up into a little grid.
Re:Funny, but badly researched... (Score:2)
Obviously you've never done accounting.
Re:Funny, but badly researched... (Score:2)
Show me one person who has a usefull use for spreadsheets ...
I wrote a spreadsheet a few weeks ago that calculated the remaining creep life of steel pipework. I have also written one that calculates fatigue.
For my own personal use I have one that calculates the correct aspect ratios and borders for my Avisynth scripts when converting AVIs to VCD or SVCD...
They aren't just use for creating long lists.
Re:Funny, but badly researched... (Score:2)
(I canceled my CIS account in late 1995, after using it for quite a while.
I have a program book from 1984 that has a program to automate compuserve so that you will not spend as much time online, to reduce bills.
Missing pages in the history of the Internet... (Score:3, Funny)
2002 : First X10 cam sold thru spam; meanwhile thousands of anti-spam s/w kits sold!
2002 : Bill Gates sends spam on Trustworthy Computing to all registered devotees.
2002 : Code Red brings IIS-based servers to their knees.
2003 : Slammer brings down the Internet and even ATMs.
2003 : Microsoft walks out of W3C meet, vows to remain with proprietary designs.
2002 : Opera releases Bork edition for MSN pages.
.
.
.
.
.
.
2008 : A separate internet - Slashnet is created. Henceforth, slashdotting will not affect regular internet users.
2009 : Microsoft buys Slashdot, karma virus hits Slashdot, millions of users get karma +10,000! Old timers encouraged to adopt Palladium to get good karma.
How it really happened: (Score:5, Funny)
1981: Lary Flint and other Porn big shots support the effort.
1982: IBM turns down an offer to control the new born ARPANET, they're too busy licensing C:\>.
1986: Buttered popcorn beats out Gummy Bears by 20% in the first ever international email survey. Thus spam is invented.
1989: Playboy releases first ever Playmate gallery in ASCII on Gopher.
1991: Al Gore changes the name of the project by inventing the term "internet". Later NCSA releases the first browser, mosaic.
1993: The warez pups populate the Internet with copies of Doom and give users a reason to get online.
1994: The motion picture "Hackers" captures audiences with its amazing 3d representations of the internet, thus VRML is invented.
1995: Windows 95 hits store shelves hyping Plug and Play. ISA 28.8's fly off the shelves.
1998: Windows 98 is released with an integrated web browser, courtesy of Microsoft, and everyone forgets who Netscape is.
2000: Slashdot posts a story about about how cool slashdot is, and is instantly slashdotted as people reload the page.
2002: Grandma finally gets it when you tell her the internet isnt on the AOL cd she got in the mail.
2003: Linux becomes THE buzzword, instantly making it the #1 os to brag about and will inevitably dominate the desktop forever. Resistance is futile.
2004: Since AOL decides not to port AOL 8 to Linux the huge ISP fails and Time Warner starts talks with X10 about new and improved "Popup Commercials" for Cable TV.
Of course I missed a few minor things, like how WAP became the dominant authoring language, IRC put AT&T and MCI out of business, and how SCO ranted and raved about nonsense until they were beaten by a giant penguin.
Matrix: How it really happened (Score:2)
Why do they bother? (Score:2, Insightful)
Slashdot should stick to news stories. Checking blogdex and daypop once a day gives me a far better grasp of what 'cool links' are makign their way around the internet.
The Lemon? (Score:3, Funny)
The lemon? (Score:2)
There was a time when I thought the internet could be no more ironic... I beleive I was wrong in that assumption.
Re:The lemon? (Score:2)
Re:The lemon? (Score:3, Insightful)
Apparently the do not. Do you know what irony is? If you're claiming that The Onion is ironic, then I guess you don't.
I have a feeling you meant satire or possibly sarcasm, but you're probably too confused to figure out which.
Internet has no future (Score:2, Troll)
2004 : the mass market of hardware is mainly converted to Palladium.
2005 : M$ releases Windows Longhorn, thus activating Palladium.
Internet has no future.
Asshats! (Score:2, Insightful)
Cheers man, you just got slashdotted!
How many things did you predict? (Score:2)
Instant messaging
An auction site
Personal ads
Job hunting sites
and
MMORPGS
Re:How many things did you predict? (Score:2)
they missed some more important timeline (Score:3, Informative)
-browser war
-opensource/unix/linux
-apache webserver
-wireless (802.11a/b/g)
anything else?
Re:they missed some more important timeline (Score:2)
(Note to network experts who might read this post: I don't actually know all the OCs, I was just guessing.)
Re:they missed some more important timeline (Score:2)
truncated version (Score:5, Funny)
B: The web was invented. It had pretty pictures. Some people thought they could make money from it. They failed.
C: Spam and pop-ups.
The end.
Re:truncated version (Score:2)
Re:truncated version (Score:2)
Presumabaly, he would eat your soul.
When did you join The Internet? (Score:2)
I'm not sure when I did.
All I remember is that, at first I had email through a bbs-email gateway. I used this to download files with an email-ftp gateway. The bbs owner was not amused.
When I finally got on the net, it was via a dialup unix box. I remember that some months after this, the first version of Mosaic for Windows (and shortly after, for the Amiga) was released.
Those months, I dabbled in Gopher, but with the advent of Mosaic, I quickly gave it up.
If Only (Score:2)
If only, is there anything we could have done to prevent the worlwide spam epidemic ?
How come (Score:2)
/.ed -- here's the article (as seen by lynx) (Score:3, Informative)
Best. Qoute. Never. (Score:4, Funny)
Since its inception almost 30 years ago, the internet has been transformed from a primitive device for sharing thoughts and ideas, into a massive network where people pay to connect and read advertisements they don't want, while calling each other "asshats".
Sounds painfully like Fark.com to me.. and to a lesser extent, Slashdot.
Re:Best. Qoute. Never. (Score:2, Funny)
An oldie but a goodie: History of the World (Score:5, Funny)
100,000 B.C.: Man domesticates the AIBO.
10,000 B.C.: Civilization begins when early farmers first learn to cultivate hot grits.
3000 B.C.: Sumerians develop a primitive cuneiform perl script.
2920 B.C.: A legendary flood sweeps Slashdot, filling up a Borland / Inprise story with hundreds of offtopic posts.
1750 B.C.: Hammurabi, a Mesopotamian king, codifies the first EULA.
490 B.C.: Greek city-states unite to defeat the Persians. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the Greeks "get it".
399 B.C.: Socrates is convicted of impiety. Despite the efforts of freesocrates.com, he is forced to kill himself by drinking hemlock.
336 B.C.: Fat-Time Charlie becomes King of Macedonia and conquers Persia.
4 B.C.: Following the Star (as in hot young actress) of Bethelem, wise men travel from far away to troll for baby Jesus.
A.D. 476: The Roman Empire BSODs.
A.D. 610: The Glorious MEEPT!! founds Islam after receiving a revelation from God. Following his disappearance from Slashdot in 632, a succession dispute results in the emergence of two troll factions: the Pythonni and the Perliites.
A.D. 800: Charlemagne conquers nearly all of Germany, only to be acquired by andover.net.
A.D. 874: Linus the Red discovers Iceland.
A.D. 1000: The epic of the Beowulf Cluster is written down. It is the first English epic poem.
A.D. 1095: Pope Bruce II calls for a crusade against the Turks when it is revealed they are violating the GPL. Later investigation reveals that Pope Bruce II had not yet contacted the Turks before calling for the crusade.
A.D. 1215: Bowing to pressure to open-source the British government, King John signs the Magna Carta, limiting the British monarchy's power. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1348: The ILOVEYOU virus kills over half the population of Europe. (The other half was not using Outlook.)
A.D. 1420: Johann Gutenberg invents the printing press. He is immediately sued by monks claiming that the technology will promote the copying of hand-transcribed books, thus violating the church's intellectual property.
A.D. 1429: Natalie Portman of Arc gathers an army of Slashdot trolls to do battle with the moderators. She is eventually tried as a heretic and stoned (as in petrified).
A.D. 1478: The Catholic Church partners with doubleclick.net to launch the Spanish Inquisition.
A.D. 1492: Christopher Columbus arrives in what he believes to be "India", but which RMS informs him is actually "GNU/India".
A.D. 1508-12: Michaelengelo attempts to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling with ASCII art, only to have his plan thwarted by the "Lameness Filter."
A.D. 1517: Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the church door and is promptly moderated down to (-1, Flamebait).
A.D. 1553: "Bloody" Mary ascends the throne of England and begins an infamous crusade against Protestants. ESR eats his words.
A.D. 1588: The "IF I EVER MEET YOU, I WILL KICK YOUR ASS" guy meets the Spanish Armada.
A.D. 1603: Tokugawa Ieyasu unites the feuding pancake-eating ninjas of Japan.
A.D. 1611: Mattel adds Galileo Galilei to its CyberPatrol block list for proposing that the Earth revolves around the sun.
A.D. 1688: In the so-called "Glorious Revolution", King James II is bloodlessly forced out of power and flees to France. ESR again triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1692: Anti-GIF hysteria in the New World comes to a head in the infamous "Salem GIF Trials", in which 20 alleged GIFs are burned at the stake. Later investigation reveals that many of the supposed GIFs were actually PNGs.
A.D. 1769: James Watt patents the one-click steam engine.
Where's the Monty Python reference? (Score:2)
You forgot to mention that nobody expected it! = )
A real, good and serious history... (Score:3, Interesting)
They've got it backward (Score:2, Funny)
The phone message was "Did you get my email".
A more complete history (Score:5, Informative)
From the Amazon review: "Waldrop interviewed dozens of contemporaries and examined reams of notes and primary sources to compose this massive biography of influence that stretches from MIT to the Pentagon to Xerox PARC and far beyond."
Many funny annecdotes are part of the story: Why is the mouse called "Mouse", the origin of "Requests for Comments", why is it called "Ethernet" and so on.
Strongly recommended!
Moo (Score:2)
People have no understanding of *history* (Score:2)
Most people I encounter here in the United States have only a limited grasp of the history of even our own country. I don't know how it is elsewhere, but American society is so future-focused that we have only the most dim recollections of even recent history.
Java and JavaScript (Score:4, Funny)
Then along came the Internet, where everything was in HTML, which had none of these problems (the worst that could happen was a screen that looked bad).
But then along came Java and Java Script, and the Internet has "caught up", so now web pages are full of frequent crashes, lockups, bizarre messages, infinite loops. Once again computer users can enjoy when they were used to in the pre-Internet days. No longer are they in an environment free of the mistakes of bad programmers .
Al Gore helped fund the public utility: Internet (Score:2)
Several years ago, people were saying that Vint Cerf was the "father of the Internet". I found Vint's email address somewhere and wrote to him. He said that it was true that Al Gore was an originator of the Internet; Al was the first government leader to support making the old DarpaNet and the old, largely proprietary Internet into a public utility. Vint was one of the technical fathers of the Internet, but Al Gore was the father of the public utility we know today.
It is difficult to imagine now, but t
Internet is a public utility, the inter-net not. (Score:2)
The Internet DID NOT EXIST in the 60s and 70s. That was DarpaNet. The Internet is a public utility; DarpaNet was used by DARPA, Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration, an organization of the U.S. government that studies the best way to kill people and destroy property.
Darpa's inter-net began to be used by universities and by people who had some connection with universities, such as people at Tektronix, a company that was manufacturing oscilloscopes for military use.
The big contribution of
Re:Homestar Runner (Score:2)
Re:Homestar Runner (Score:2)
The troll mod still baffles me though...