Thursday, July 26, 2012

Gore Didn't Create The Internet, Bush Did

During the 2000 presidential campaign, the Democrat nominee Vice President Al Gore claimed to have created the Internet.  In the aftermath of the election, in which the Republican candidate George W. Bush (then the governor of Texas) carried Florida by a narrow margin and thus achieved a narrow victory in the Electoral College, there was an effort to recount the votes that was stopped by a Supreme Court decision.  Gore supporters would soon claim that their candidate was the true winner, and that Bush stole the election.

Although Al Gore's claim to be the Internet's creator has never been taken all that seriously, since it has been commonly thought that the Internet was a civilian by-product of a military project called ARPAnet, some recently revealed (according to the perspective of yours truly, anyway) information indicates that the idea of the Internet comes from a man named Bush.  This Bush, however, was not named George, but Vannevar.  He was a presidential science advisor during World War II.  According to this article in the Wall Street Journal, it was Vannevar Bush's ideas published in the Atlantic that motivated technologists to try to connect small networks into larger ones and form a global network.  The entity that succeeded was not part of the government, but part of Xerox, known for making copiers.  Specifically, it was Xerox Parc, located in Silicon Valley.  This means that like certain high-quality copiers, the Internet is just as good as a Xerox, because in a sense, it is a Xerox.

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