Xerox PARC headquarters.
Who Really Invented The Internet? -- Gordon Crovitz, Wall Street Journal
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.
Read more ....
My Comment: I recall reading in the 1980s an autobiography on Steve Jobs where he was boasting that many of his ideas (the use of the mouse, the mac, ethernet, etc.) .... all came came from Xerox Parc. As for Darpa's contribution to the internet .... they did a lot and have been credited for it .... but it is Xerox Parc that did the heavy lifting.
2 comments:
This is a truly awful editorial that's just desperate to find some way to give credit to private business. Xerox made contributions, but Ethernet is not the internet, and it's not even required for the internet. It's the most common wiring standard in use on intRAnets today, but there were plenty of other competitors, and the TCP/IP protocol that let them all talk to each other was a work of government. Moreover, the World Wide Web that we use today (which is not the same as the internet, but is rather only one application of the internet) was developed pretty much entirely by CERN, a European government organization.
If you want to know the history of the internet, may I suggest asking computer geeks instead of ideologues. Check out the responses to this article at Slashdot: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/07/23/1751223/who-really-invented-the-internet
In short, the WSJ does good reporting, but their editorial page often skews things beyond recognition as facts.
PS: Someone managed to troll the top part of that Slashdot thread into politics; do a Ctrl-F for "houstonbofh" to skip that and go straight to the technical discussion.
Post a Comment