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2004-04-15 Home Front: Culture Wars

Huge Blow to Al Gore -- [The Real] Web inventor wins major new technology prize

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Posted by cingold 2004-04-15 1:37:43 PM|| || Front Page|| [3 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 OK since it gets quoted that often: Can I have a source where Al Gore said he "invented the web"?
What he actually did (and took credit for) was to push for legislation (from 1991 onwards) that promoted the use of the internet in schools and colleges.

Posted by True German Ally 2004-04-15 2:01:34 PM|| 2004-04-15 2:01:34 PM|| Front Page Top

#2 From CNN 3/9/1999 Intervireview with Wolfie B.

BLITZER: Why should Democrats, looking at the Democratic nomination process, support you instead of Bill Bradley, a friend of yours, a former colleague in the Senate? What do you have to bring to this that he doesn't necessarily bring to this process?

GORE: Well, I will be offering -- I'll be offering my vision when my campaign begins. And it will be comprehensive and sweeping. And I hope that it will be compelling enough to draw people toward it. I feel that it will be.

But it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. 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.

Whole quote as to be in context. He was doing his Al Gore listing exercise. He might have misspoken, but it sure sounded as if he took credit as a Senator for internet creation.

Posted by Anonymous4052 2004-04-15 2:27:35 PM|| 2004-04-15 2:27:35 PM|| Front Page Top

#3 "Huge Blow to Al Gore..."

Sounds like he's finally getting to follow in Clinton's footsteps.

Posted by Bulldog 2004-04-15 2:49:54 PM|| 2004-04-15 2:49:54 PM|| Front Page Top

#4 LMAO

Posted by Matt 2004-04-15 2:55:15 PM|| 2004-04-15 2:55:15 PM|| Front Page Top

#5 TGA -- 1991 was about 20 years after the Internet was developed. It was quite popular already; I started college in 1989, and everyone who wanted one had an Internet email address and access to FTP and Usenet. Three quarters of the student body had Internet access in their dorm rooms; by 1993 that access was via 10MB Ethernet. Granted, that school had some sweet deals with AT&T for hardware, but by 1991 any college student who wanted to could access the Internet.

The very small rural grade and high school I went to had a website (and probably full-time access) by at latest 1995.

Al Gore's bills and Senate votes had very, very, very little to do with the Internet's growth.

Posted by Robert Crawford 2004-04-15 2:58:48 PM|| [http://www.kloognome.com] 2004-04-15 2:58:48 PM|| Front Page Top

#6 TGA - unless Al was crucial to funding DARPAnet in the late 60's (unlikely), he was jerking us off with that self-serving statement. Voters tend to notice when pols start fondling our private parts for political gain, and he got called on it, then became a widly-known joke for trying to claim he had more than a general funding role - along with every other member of congress.

Posted by Dr. Evil 2004-04-15 3:16:19 PM|| 2004-04-15 3:16:19 PM|| Front Page Top

#7 I demand a recount!

Posted by Al Gore 2004-04-15 3:48:09 PM|| 2004-04-15 3:48:09 PM|| Front Page Top

#8 Thanks Robert Crawford, that explains it for me.

Posted by True German Ally 2004-04-15 4:14:50 PM|| 2004-04-15 4:14:50 PM|| Front Page Top

#9 Gawd, I hate to defend Gore, but there is a way in which his claim is true, depending on your meaning of "is". Sigh.

What happened in 91 was the creation of the current independent groups that administer the Internet - ICANN etc. Prior to that, the allocation of IP addresses was done by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, who inherited the ARPANET with the specific charge to promolgate it among the wider university and research community.

Gore had a role in that move from NIST to ICANN. He didn't conceive it or accomplish it, but he did have a peripheral role in making it official policy so to do.

Posted by rkb 2004-04-15 4:25:18 PM|| 2004-04-15 4:25:18 PM|| Front Page Top

#10 I'm not sure who exactly this gut works for, but the main idea of the internet was, I thought, created by physicists to help them better communicate across countries and transmit data that they needed sooner. I think. Or something like that. I'll do some more research (read-ask dad) and correct later.

Posted by S 2004-04-15 5:23:13 PM|| 2004-04-15 5:23:13 PM|| Front Page Top

#11 *guy

my bad

Posted by S 2004-04-15 5:23:41 PM|| 2004-04-15 5:23:41 PM|| Front Page Top

#12 I thought it was a DARPA project circa 60... tho lord only know where TCP comes from.

Posted by LinePrinter 2004-04-15 5:43:42 PM|| 2004-04-15 5:43:42 PM|| Front Page Top

#13 Okay, I'll bite on this. I've been at least tangentially involved with the Internet from the early 70s .... wrote a book about some of the technical aspects of the protocols. So if this is boring to you, skip by!! LOL

Early data communications were built on dedicated phone circuits. A big company would lease a line from HDQTRS to a regional office; the hdqtrs computer would dial the other computer via modem, using a connection much like a voice call sets up. The resulting circuit is dedicated to that call (or to several calls all sharing the same connection). Only large organizations could afford this because they were in essence reserving a chunk of the phone system for their own use.

Worked okay for those big companies, at least at first. But what about DOD - especially in the event of a nuclear attack that might wipe out half the circuits in the country?

What was needed was an approach to networks that could adapt if part of the infrastructure was destroyed.

The result is what is called "packet switching" (as opposed to the circuit switching which is at the base of the old telephone voice system, and hence of the earliest data comm that used that system).

In packet switching, your email (or this comment) is broken down into little pieces, each of which gets a to/from stamp and a time stamp on it. The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) software sends those off and makes sure it gets an Acknowledgement for each one within a certain period of time. If not, it sends that packet again until the entire message has been Acknowledged as received.

Now, to send off those packets, TCP actually uses the services of the Internet Protocol (IP). IP takes each packet and (lots of details skipped here) checks to see if it knows which of the router computers that make up the Internet knows how to ship that packet to its destination.

If none of them do, they ask THEIR neighbors etc. Eventually the answer filters back and the IP software on my computer sends out that packet. Then it does the same thing for each other packet the TCP software gave it to ship.

Since many routers are closely linked in the Internet, as the Internet backbones (fiber optic cables, now) are developed, there is almost always a number of different routes that packet might take. The first router passes it to another, and that one passes it to another etc. until it arrives and the recipient Acknowledges receipt.

Pretty soon, DARPA research labs and universities doing DOD research were exchanging information over an experimental packet-switched network called the ARPANET. Everybody had to know the IP address of the computer they wanted to talk with. New software protocols were developed either in parallel with TCP or that used TCP to facilitate different kinds of data sharing: email, ftp (file transfer protocol) etc.

Then, Berners put together two existing ideas with one new one to make the World Wide Web a possibility. The two old ideas were a) hyperlinks and b) a markup language. Hyperlinks had been around for a while, in some then-new attempts at user-friendly database management. And DOD had created a powerful Structured Graphical Markup Language to allow, say, the designers of the F-16 to create truckloads of documentation that could be printed out by computers using different software packages.

Take a few basics from SGML. Add the idea of hyperlinks, only instead of linking to other data records, LINK TO A NETWORK ADDRESS, and call the result HTML. Define a new protocol similar to ftp and call it HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol).

Finally - Berner's powerful addition - make those network resource addresses *virtual* rather than *physical*. That is to say, instead of a user having to know the actual IP address where a web page or photo would be stored, let her specify a name like "www.rantburg.com/index".

Then, add some special computers to the Internet infrastructure which would look up those Universal Resource Locators and translate them into the IP addresses that the IP software / routers use.

Bingo - add in a advances that led to cheap personal computers, stir in pointing mechanisms and graphical user interfaces (i.e. Windows and the like) and, when there is sufficent mass of capability and interest, spin it out for public use.

I left out a lot of stuff, like the way that DOD paid UC Berkeley to make a version of Unix incorporating TCP/IP early on, and seeding university computer science & engineering departments with free copies. It took nearly a decade of slow growth, with the convergence of a lot of other technologies (like fiber optics and digital communications switches etc.) before it all took of in the early-mid 90s.

Okay - boring history lesson over!! LOL

Posted by Robin Burk 2004-04-15 9:12:51 PM|| 2004-04-15 9:12:51 PM|| Front Page Top

#14 Argh - lots of typos in that long spiel -- but if I try to correct stuff I'll be tempted to add all the OTHER info related to the development of the Web.

Must ... put ... keyboard ... down .....

Posted by rkb 2004-04-15 9:16:53 PM|| 2004-04-15 9:16:53 PM|| Front Page Top

#15 Thanks, Robin. I read your entire article and learned a lot.

Posted by Mike Sylwester 2004-04-15 10:14:41 PM|| 2004-04-15 10:14:41 PM|| Front Page Top

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