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July 27, 2012 By Colin Wood
The Internet ranks somewhere between fire and sliced bread on the world’s list of greatest inventions. But despite being a fairly recent invention, its exact origin remains a point of dispute. Recently, writers from The Wall Street Journal and Scientific American weighed in on the issue, drawing comments from Google’s own Internet forefather Vint Cerf.
Just Ask Al
Al Gore famously blundered his way through a CNN interview in which he stated, “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.”
His statement was, most likely, just a poor choice a words. While it sounds like Gore was trying to say that he partially supported the creation of the Internet through legislation along with many others, he did say the words: “I took the initiative in creating the Internet,” leaving himself the option to take credit if anyone wanted to give it to him. It is generally agreed that Gore is not personally responsible for single-handedly creating the Internet, but he may have played at least a partial role in fostering its creation through federal legislation. And many people believe that the federal government essentially created the Internet through research and legislation.
Private Enterprise Is Responsible
But the government did not create the Internet, L. Gordon Crovitz wrote in a recent op-ed for The Wall Street Journal. The government envisioned a World Wide Web as early as the 1940s and went on to develop the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). However, that network did not lead to the Internet we have today, Crovitz wrote.
Crovitz contends it was Xerox that invented the Internet, though the company wasn’t quite sure what it had. Xerox used its computer networks to share copiers, because that was the company's business, but that’s where the idea stopped. When Steve Jobs visited Xerox in 1979 to borrow some ideas, he may have seen something bigger. "They just had no idea what they had," Jobs said.
The government had many of today’s Internet’s integral pieces, such as TCP/IP, but never put them together, Crovitz wrote. It was ultimately private enterprise that made the connections to create the Internet we have today, Crovitz wrote – government just needed to get out of the way.
A Misunderstanding
Actually, the government did invent the Internet and Crovitz doesn’t really understand what he’s talking about, according to a Scientific American rebuttal written by Michael Moyer. No private company could have accomplished such a huge undertaking as the Internet, he wrote.
Crovitz is confused about technology, Moyer wrote. Just because Xerox invented Ethernet, doesn’t mean it also invented “the” Internet – it didn’t, Moyer wrote. Connecting several computers together isn’t the same thing as a worldwide computer network. Robert Metcalfe, a researcher at Xerox PARC who co-invented the Ethernet protocol, jokingly referenced the idea on July 23 in a tweet that read, “Is it possible I invented the whole damn Internet?”
“The most important part of what we now know of as the Internet is the TCP/IP protocol, which was invented by Vincent Cerf [sic] and Robert Kahn,” Moyer wrote. “Crovitz mentions TCP/IP, but only in passing, calling it (correctly) ‘the Internet’s backbone.’ He fails to mention that Cerf and Kahn developed TCP/IP while working on a government grant.”
Moyer also pointed out that several others criticized Crovitz for his misunderstandings, perhaps most notably the author of Dealers of Lightning, a history of Xerox PARC that Crovitz used as his main source of material. “While I’m gratified in a sense that he cites my book,” Michael Hiltzik wrote, “it’s my duty to point out that he’s wrong. My book bolsters, not contradicts, the argument that the Internet had its roots in the ARPANET, a government project.”
Actually, I Invented the Internet
In a recent interview published by CNET, Cerf, one of the creators of the TCP/IP protocol, responded to Crovitz’s piece, rejecting most his ideas, which he characterized as a “revisionist interpretation.”
The Internet did start with the ARPANET project and the federal government directly funded the creation of the Internet we know today, Cerf wrote. And Xerox deserves credit for great work, Cerf wrote, including creation of the Ethernet protocol, the ALTO personal computer, the Xerox Network System and PARC Universal Packet. “XEROX did link homogenous Ethernets together but the internetworking method did not scale particularly well,” Cerf wrote.
Ultimately, it was the work of researchers around the world from dozens of organizations that created the Internet. “After our initial paper was published, detailed design was conducted at Stanford during 1974 and implementation started in 1975 at Stanford, BBN and University College London. After that, a number of other institutions, notably MIT, SRI, ISI, UCLA, NDRE, engaged heavily in the work,” Cerf wrote.
As for Crovitz’s declaration that the TCP/IP protocol languished for decades in the hands of government, only to be set free by private enterprise, Cerf responded, “I would happily fertilize my tomatoes with Crovitz's assertion.”
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why is there no mention of Tim Berners-Lee in this article?
Because he invented the World Wide Web not the Internet.
Whats the difference?
It's fairly accepted fact that Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web and hence the Internet. Al Gore was just a politician who facilitated its expansion within the USA and had little to do with its global proliferation. A shamefully blinkered, poorly researched article.
@The truth... lol? You apparently got deceived by the olympics ceremony tonight. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, a small piece of the puzzle. The Internet was entirely developed in the USA. Tim merely connected a few dots regarding hyperlinks and dns. I'm afraid there are going to be many confused people. By the way, Tim developed the world wide web while at CERN in Switzerland and now works in the USA.
The World Wide Web connects the whole world together via the internet.
You folks really need to be more specific to avoid confusion with the standard reader. Tim Designed HTTP and HTML, which wouldn't have worked very well without having TCP/IP and DNS already in place.
Difference between www and Internet? While the Internet is similar to a system of roads and streets, the World Wide Web is similar to a postal addressing system that uses the roads and streets they are tied to. The Internet is the network we travel on, just like the network of streets we drive. The addressing system of the World Wide Web lets us stop at Domain Names, just like we are able to stop driving when we reach the postal address for a house.
The physical layer, the bare electronic handshakes and communication logic known as Ethernet, was jointly developed by Xerox, Digital Equipment and Intel - Core logic by Robert Metcalfe of Xerox, who left to start 3Com, DEC provided comm addressing logic, handshaking protcols and error detection/correction, and Intel provided chip foundry to make Ethernet marketable. 3Com built the initial and major Ethernet and system boards used in computers.
Actually, Bob, that's not correct either. The internet and world wide web are completely different animals. You and I can surf the web all day long and not come close to using the internet.
Thanks for using those similes to clarify the difference, Dave. It was quite helpful to this layperson.
It is also worth exploring the many ways in which the government was involved in the development of HDTV. The switchover to broadcast HDTV was not possible as a piecemeal, gradual change.
I am completely lost and confused as to what you guys or this article have said.
lol, brb, asap, rotflmao, 1973, E=mc*, ect. and other confusing letters that mean things.
thank god, someone finally used a metaphor.
the internet is awesome
lol yeah all it took was a simple analogy to explain all that giberish.. damn nerds
"Actually, the government did invent the Internet" Gawd, u sound like Obama. The government doesn't invent anything. Smart people invent everything, including the Internet. So some of these people were working on government money to develop their ideas. So what? Tax money helped smart people to bring their ideas to fruition. If tax money wasn't part of it, most likely private venture capital would have been. But venture capital doesn't "invent" anything either. PEOPLE DO.
Because he didn't invent the internet or have anything to do with the underlying structure of it. He wrote a hypertext layer that utilizes the already in place internet.
The WWW is a hypertext markup layer that operates on the internet. They are separate things. The internet is a collection of protocols TCP/IP etc that connect systems all over the world. The WWW uses that structure to serve web pages.
That is a very good description of what the differences are.
who cares
Actually I invented the internet with NO government money at all...in my moms basement.
You are ALL wrong! It was "I" that invented the internet! ... in the kitchen... with the lead pipe...
the why what people invented the internet is amazing but they sould try to get a way to speed things up a little please
I'm surprised no one's mentioned J.C.R. Licklider. Though he never invented anything his ideas were certainly all about the Internet. It was his paper, "Man's-Computer Symbiosis," written in 1960 that truly laid out the vision for what we're using today. I love his story line about the math computer genius with a degree in psychology who was interested more in man's relation to computers than in the technology itself. He's idea help ushered in the realities of graphical computing, point-and-click interfaces, digital libraries, e-commerce, online banking, and he dreamed about computers networked together. Here's what Taylor said about Licklider, "most of the significant advances in computer technology—including the work that my group did at Xerox PARC—were simply extrapolations of Lick's vision. They were not really new visions of their own. So he was really the father of it all."
I suspect there are huge oversimplifications in this debate about who invented what. And so much depends on which language is dominant and who's holding the microphone. The British, for example, will assert that everything's up to Berners-Lee. It seems fairer to suggest that the WWB is the achievement of thousands of individuals, and then a few people added the final touches to bring it to full realisation.
Surely someone can come up with a definitive answer to this question. Similar to the 'who invented calculus' debate, the answer that the central ideas had been around since Archimides, but that Newton was the individual who set forth a workable procedure that Leibnitz improved upon and shared with other mathematicians is satisfactory to most and perfectly comprehensible to the general reader. Left solely to Newton, the Calculus would have been arcane and virtually unknown outside Cambridge. Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb, but on the backbone of scientific discoveries in electricity, investor backing, the dream of manufactures to keep factories cleanly lit for 24 hour production ...
LMAO @ Johnny Rocket. Is that a subtle George Carlin reference for us older folks? "Call me back Agnes. My stories are on."
to my side real i don't know who invented the internet can you help me
I'm a HVAC technician and invented the internet The internet it's a mixture of R-22 & R-410A. How did I get here !!! I was for parts for my 68 mustang...! www.getmyhousecool.com
To understand the internet, you must understand how data is transferred from a physical media (IE Cable) to an application (IE Web Brower) that is accessible to our computers.. If you research the OSI model for networking ( Here's a wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model) you will notice the 7 layers of networking.. I believe both Government and free enterprise are resposible for the different layers.. Most likely, government for the infrastructure and protocal (TCP/IP) and Free Enterprise for the application layer.. It was generally recognized that the US department of defense was responsible for the the backbone of the internet creation..
I LOVE THE ETHERNET!
The Internet exist at Layer 3 (network) and 4 (transport), the www exists at layer 7 (application). This is the OSI model, look it up and learn.
gangnam style.
Actually I invented the Internet so I could create Facebook and many other social networks.
Wow this IS confusing! And its just turning into a big arguement. Everyone is suggesting a different person who invented the internet. When really, it was alot of different people putting each others ideas together that invented the internet. There is no "one" specific person. But of course, i guess people need someone to have all the credit.
Tim Berners-Lee did invent internet
I had always heard that the building of the internet was initiated by the DOD in a effort to maintain communications if an area was destroyed by nuclear attack? A system like the internet could route the data communications around a damaged area and thus maintain the data link? So who ever invented or developed the different pieces that make up the internet, like TCP/IP it was the DOD that actually got the ball rolling on an actual system that eventually encompassed the world and out grew the original purpose. Is my understanding a fairy tale?
Tim Berners-Lee did invent internet .. You Americans are Just amazing. You just cant except that you didnt discover everything. Has a race you become more and more brainwashed. A man born in london England invented the interet, go on, bite the bullet have some pride, please except the truth.
I love British music from the 60s .John Lennon rules but I do not believe that Tim Berners-Lee invented the Internet.No one person did.It is like saying One man discovered the computer! it started in about ten rooms and by the early 70s went down to one Room and got smaller and smaller until now we have iPod touches and cell phones that can send and receive information from around the world.A lot of people invented the Internet and I believe we cannot trace it's origin to one person!
i guess we are all in connection to who invented the in-ter-net, its me i wanted to search where my house was and i ended up inventing internet.
i really need to find out who invented internet
A little simple research would get you the answer to who, how, when, and where the Internet was invented. http://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/0684832674 Please understand the Internet and the World Wide Web are two different things, though www could not exist without the internet.
that didnt help me at all!?
I invented the internet... Al Gore FTW
Hello son.
yo mama dot com invented the internet
i your cats small intestine invented the internet
MEOW thats how i say hi
god
Perhaps the single biggest reason that people think "the internet" or "web 1.0" is "free" and open and that it started in the US is because we broke up AT&T. Competition in the WAN made distributed router networks across 6,000 central offices cost effective. At the same time the bell monopolies responded to the competitive WAN/IXC threat to two of their voice revenue streams by expanding local calling areas (LATAs) and going to flat-rate dial-up pricing. That's how layers 1-2 of the web started in the mid to late 1980s. WWW (layer 3) came in 1989 and the 4-5 layer stack for a store and forward database look-up web of content was completed in the early 1990s via http, html and mosaic. So was Bill McGowan the real father of the internet?
Actually, the first internet was created by they guys who put that inner net lining in all our swimming shorts...
Ive got a lovely bunch of coconuts tidle-di-di standing some where in the road small ones, large ones, some as big as you head...
Actually I envented the internet just to put my face on it.
IM CINFUSED
The Yellow Pages have been around for ages and the WWW is just a glorified version of them. Or if you wish a very large Shopping Mall. Wait until your IPS address becomes your new phone #, there's more to come down the pipe.
Fascinating discussion here - I well remember how great it was when Tim Berner-Lee's innovation in the early 1990s essentially created a readily-usable World Wide Web. Before that, the Internet was fun, and fascinating, and addictive, but a bit difficult to use due to the command-line interface common before GUI browsers were written. You can find very interesting information on how the various components of the Internet were developed on Wikipedia by searching for "HTML", "Internet", and "Hypertext" - fair warning, though: once in those articles, your biggest danger will lie in not getting distracted by numerous links to other articles explaining the history of the Internet.
i think the inventor of www also invented the internet well im curious to know...........maybe we can use the time machine for this
The internet is not an invention and not one person created internet manypeople in US had together made internet. Sir Leonard and Robert Taylor gave the idea and there are many thers who also helped
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Silence moon
If Tim Berners-Lee hadn't invented HTML and then WWW, would the internet be as important as it today? Without the graphical interface you just have a command line and a load of protocols that most people cannot understand. Its important to separate the internet from the Web. Berners-Lee invented the web.
Actually Tim-Berners Lee an Englishman invented the internet. Also Great Britain invented the television, the computer and the telephone.
no sandra your statement is wrong there are many people who created internet NOT TIM -BERNERS LEE the truth is that the idea of internet was given by Robert Taylor and Sir Leonard.
"HATS OFF TO MOON"
Tim Berners-lee made the world wide web, but who exactly fought of the idea and made it happen?
nvm my last comment
The reason why there is no one simple answer to who invented the internet is,our technology was not capable of this advanced technology.We have borrowed this format from elsewhere and if you think I am wierd for saying it, well,look at facts.
NO YOU ALL ARE WRONG THE CREATERS OF GOOGLE ALSO CREATED THE INTERNET FIRST SO THAT THEY COULD BECOME RICH!!!!!! AND YOU ALL FELL FOR IT THIS WHOLE TIME SIKE I WAS LYING THIS WHOLE TIME I WA TYPING THIS
cool
Strange. Several folks here are using a common but incorrect use of the term Internet. I was using The Internet (TCP/IP protocol and applications) at the University of Washington in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This technology was fairly well developed from the 1960s and 70s, and included email, file transfers, and other simple "apps". But, their were no browsers or web pages at that time. The vast majority of that early Internet technology was invented in the USA. Thats a fact jack. Look it up. In the late 1980s Tim Berners-lee invented HTML and HTTP and the Browser which gave the Internet a MUCH more usable model for "browsing" and sharing information. I wouldn't try to downplay the importance of those technolgies which are also known as the World Wide Web (which uses TCP/IP or roughly, the Internet for "transport" of its data), but those saying Tim Berners-lee invented the Internet are flat out incorrect. They are using slang, essentially. In my opinion, debate on this article is discussing an academic subject, quoting experts in the field and it would be appropriate to use the accepted language of those experts in the field, not street slang language. It would be unfortunate if ignorance succeeds in erasing important historical inventions. We would have to come up with another word for what Vincent Cerf and his colleagues invented and that would be confusing. Stop it please.
meow
meow
who excatly invented the internet? i need the names and why they invented it!
lol idk the answer but umm ok guess lol??
lol that wasnt even a answer?
MUAHAHAHAHAH TRY TO SEARCH IT YOUR SELF
His name is VINTON Cerf. Not Vincent.
I INVENTED IT LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL
cade is code for code
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hi my cat
hi suasage
y its so difficult to understand !!..can some one explain in simple terms .. its getting confused
look guys it doesnt seem that hard to understand. the "internet" is the basic term for "something" that connects computers to each other through wires and electricity (and wirelessly aswell). The world wide web is the term for your browser.. basically.. so from what i understand they connected computers together in a simple way such as email, and then someone else invented the way we can all get onto the internet and share information which then became more and more complex until you get to the present.
so it wasnt one person or even just a couple people, it took ideas from all over the world to come together or a period of time and still continues today. so no one really invented it, because even today we discover new uses and more complex ideas are drawn from old ideas that havent been perfected.
over*
the british are coming
Love how non-Americans (@Alan Redman) will say Americans are just egoists claiming we invented everything in order to make their claim that Americans in fact, pretty much have never invented ANYTHING. Why is it so hard for anyone to give America credit when credit is due?
"I love British music from the 60s .John Lennon rules but I do not believe that Tim Berners-Lee invented the Internet.No one person did.It is like saying One man discovered the computer!" Slow down! You can take the internet away from us brits (Tim just did the WEB) but we defo did the computer!
LMAO! That was hella funny TrueBrit!
Aliens.
LMAO! THAT WAS HELLA FUNNY TUREBRIT!
Americans imported all their talent from the rest of the world, see 2nd world war, nuclear bombs,etc. Buy it in not a lot of home grown talent. "World series baseball" just in America? lot of people did the internet, Brits did www.
Hi guys and gals: As far we can read in your comments we can clearly see that the Internet was more like a "privilege" for the government, then several scientist made a great contribution to what we enjoy today. It is a fact that it has been developed in the USA but the pioneers like Sirs Leonard and Robert Taylor who gave the idea and Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web amongst others who helped to shape it and many others with applications. Have a great day!
Actually Millard Fillmore invented the Internet in the 19th century. He used wire, a woodstove, a horse, and a windmill. This is an overlooked detail in the invention of the Internet.