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| Cerf and Bob E. Kahn being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
So, who really did invent the Internet?
the Internet had its roots in the ARPANet, a government project .... the government-funded ARPANet was very much the precursor of the Internet as we know it today. .... Bob Taylor was the single most important figure in the history of the Internet, and he holds that stature because of his government role. ..... TCP/IP, the fundamental communications protocol of the Internet, was invented by Vinton Cerf (though he fails to mention Cerf's partner, Robert Kahn). He points out that Tim Berners-Lee "gets credit for hyperlinks." ..... Cerf and Kahn did develop TCP/IP--on a government contract! And Berners-Lee doesn't get credit for hyperlinks--that belongs to Doug Engelbart of Stanford Research Institute, who showed them off in a legendary 1968 demo you can see here. Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web--and he did so at CERN, a European government consortium. ...... Private enterprise had no interest in something so visionary and complex, with questionable commercial opportunities. Indeed, the private corporation that then owned monopoly control over America's communications network, AT&T, fought tooth and nail against the ARPANet. Luckily for us, a far-sighted government agency prevailed. ...... It's true that the Internet took off after it was privatized in 1995. But to be privatized, first you have to be government-owned. It's another testament to people often demeaned as "government bureaucrats" that they saw that the moment had come to set their child free.
I have long believed in private and public sector collaborations.
