History of the First Internet 396
U96 writes "Ever since the Gore claim to have "invented" the internet, its history has been the subject of misinformation and ridicule. The Institue of Internet History contains an accurate, in-depth examination of the early industrial origins of the internet. An interesting read..."
wow, irony (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering Gore never claimed to have invented the internet, you've actually managed to include misinformation in a sentence criticizing misinformation. Well done.
Gore did not claim he invented the Internet (Score:3, Insightful)
What Gore said is that in an 1999 interview with Wolf Blitzer, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." As Al Franken wrote [amazon.com]:
> The phrase "invented the Internet" first appeared in a
> Republican Party press release and would be repeated by the
> "liberal" press thousands of times during the campaign.
Snopes the urban legend debunking website reported [snopes.com] on this as well:
> Claim: Vice-President Al Gore claimed that he "invented" the
> Internet.
> Status: False.
> Origins: No, Al Gore did not claim he "invented" the Internet,
> nor did he say anything that could reasonably be interpreted
> that way. The derisive "Al Gore said he 'invented' the Internet"
> put-downs are misleading distortions of something he said
> (taken out of context) during an interview with Wolf Blitzer on
> CNN's "Late Edition" program on 9 March 1999.
As the Boston Globe [Oct 17,2000] reported:
So, if the Republicans were working to trash Gore's reputation, I guess they could say "Mission Accomplished".
Taco, thanks for proving once again the old proverb, "a lie can make it halfway 'round the world before the truth gets its boots on."
Re:Speaking of misinformation... (Score:2, Insightful)
He may not have meant for it to come out like he invented the Internet, but it sure sounds like it:
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.
Re:Speaking of misinformation... (Score:5, Insightful)
If Gore hadn't pushed for funding of the National Science Foundation to create nsfnet, the Internet wouldn't exist in the manner it is today.
Just change "took the initiative in creating the internet" with "ran the initiative to fund the creation of the internet" and you have a sentence that means the exact same thing yet can't be misinterpreted.
how terrible (Score:2, Insightful)
the 3rd or so post linked to the al gore invented the internet, now there are about 20 more to the same site.
so is there a mirror of the article somewhere for us to read?
Re:Speaking of misinformation... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Speaking of misinformation... (Score:2, Insightful)
So, in fact, Gore did take the lead in CREATING the Internet. He absolutely never claimed to have INVENTED the internet, which would imply some kind of technology effort.
Re:wow, irony (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Speaking of misinformation... (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's close enough for a good smear campaign, isn't it?
If you ever wonder why politicians so often sound like robots when they are speaking in public, this is why: because they have to constantly watch every single word they utter, to make sure that nothing they say (and no subset of anything they say) can be taken out of context and twisted against them. So instead of just speaking their position, they have to run this expensive (O(N^2)) political-defense algorithm on everything they say -- and since very few people can run that algorithm in real time, most politicians end up just repeating a few pre-vetted canned phrases over and over again.
Re:Who trusts snopes anymore? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, a partisan hack would say that.
Re:What claim? (Score:4, Insightful)
If he were an inventor, that could make sense. But, he was a lawmaker, and he was referencing his work in the congress.
If Reagan had said, "I took the initiative in creating the Star Wars Missile Defense System", would you first assume that he was working in a lab, designing high-energy lasers? Or would you go with the more rational assumption that he provided some leadership in getting it done?
The problem is that we Americans are pretty much dumb, reactionary, rather uneducated. We approach a situation already with the answer we want and grasp onto "evidence" that supports it.
Here, non-Gore supporters don't like Gore and hear someone say he claimed to invent the internet. Hearing the whole statement in context, it's difficult to rationally come to the assumption that Al was slaving away in his basement inventing routers, network cards, fiber optics, and cat-5.
We'd rather be intellectually dishonest than concede a nifty soundbite that makes us sound so smart, clever, and in tune.
Re:Al Gore's Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
Ummm... that he was a lawmaker, talking about his record, and among the things he worked on was getting support for creating the internet.
You have to either be intellectually dishonest, or dumb as a bag of hammers to assume he was inventing the internet.
Let's look at a hypothetical example. It's an example that may not have a basis in fact, but exhibits certain constraints that permit analysis, and possibly the finding of a solution.
Let's suppose I am the mayor of your town, and the streets in the town are very dirty. There's no city program for cleaning the streets. So, as mayor, I lobby the city council, dedicate resources, hire staff, and invest in street cleaning equipment.... all of this is dedicated to getting the streets clean. So, a year later, the streets are really clean, and I'm running for reelection. And I state in an interview, "During my service as your mayor, I took the initiative in cleaning the city streets."
Now... would you be a dufus and assume that statement meant I single-handedly went out and cleaned the streets? Or would you use some of your brainpower and figure out that I meant that I took the initiative in getting the streets cleaned.
Hell, I didn't like Gore, and I didn't vote for him. But it makes us all dumber when we cling to insipid arguments like, "he claimed he invented the internet".
It's the same idiocy with people saying Bush is stupid. Clearly, he's smart enough to get through grad school (even with a C average), be the governor of a large state, and become the president of the US. Not being able to speak elloquently does not make him stupid. On the other hand, I also believe he's been one of the most harmful presidents in recent history.
It's sad that we Americans have lowered the political discourse to "he claims he invented the internet", and "he's dumb". Really, it just makes us all dumber.
Re:Slashdotted Already?-Weaving the Web. (Score:1, Insightful)
Feel free to mark this as Redundant -- as long as (Score:5, Insightful)
It's bad enough to take what Gore actually said, that he took a lead role in the creation of the Internet -- which he did, by supporting the project in his political role -- and buy into the urban legend that he said he invented it. It's even worse to put quotes around it and thus falsely claim that that word came from Gore.
So in short, as Cmdr. Taco keeps reminding us, "Hey! We're News For Nerds! News doesn't have to stick to that annoying 'truth' stuff!" (No, he didn't actually say that, but hey, let's put it in quotes as if he did...)
Re:wow, irony (Score:5, Insightful)
In context, Gore's words were quite accurate [interesting-people.org]. Just as we say that Bush II invaded Iraq even though he's not out there with a rifle, or we say that "Eisenhower created the Interstate system" [utexas.edu] even though he wasn't out there with a bulldozer.
So, no, you shouldn't distort an accurate statement and then mock the distorted version. Especially where there's so much else about Gore worthy of being mocked. I'm all for mocking politicians, just keep it accurate.
Re:wow, irony (Score:5, Insightful)
Mock that if you must. But inserting "invented" in place of "took the initiative in creating" completely changes the meaning.
People keep misquoting it with "invent" because that makes it funnier- because stupidity is funny, whether or not it's true.
Re:Who trusts snopes anymore? (Score:3, Insightful)
Obviously there is no such animal as an "impartial source". Everything human made is inherently biased.
To get an unbiased view on a story you would have to know all facts related to that story in depth. This is impossible however, because:
a) not all facts are known in the public sphere; a consequence of imperfect information gathering.
b) not all facts are reported in any single news story; a consequence of bandwidth being limited, and complex issues requiring series of books instead of series of articles to be a complete accounting of the issue.
c) editors enforcing their editorial needs on reporters, such as editors on commercial news sources minimizing exposure for those stories that damage the advertisers or their corporate masters.
So, to say that a source has lost credibility because they have been shown to be biased is pretty silly. Everything is biased. It is impossible with complex issues to even get all the facts, let alone report them in an unbiased way. Heck, it's not even possible to read an unbiased story (if you ever find one) in a way that is unbiased, since we all have to deal with cognitive dissonance, and our imperfect understanding of reality means that we will discount some correct facts because they don't fit in well with some erroneous views we hold.
The only way currently that I see to get a somewhat unbiased view is to be an information hawk, get your news from all sources, cross-compare stories, keep fact databases, historical timelines, do some interviewing of key players, and generally be a reporter yourself and not rely on anyone's analysis. Since nobody can be honestly expected to do all that, I would advise the simple solution of bringing back two things people take for granted but haven't actually existed for a while now: the right to equal time for any side of the story, and the obligation of news organizations to not knowingly lie.
Re:"Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet" (Score:5, Insightful)
He had no such reputation. As the parent post's link points out, it was fabricated by the RNC and various eager writers in 2000.
Bush, however, has a long history of non-history. Which rarely has been questioned by those self-same eager boys. His arrest record. Drug use. Alchoholism until he was 40. Violent behavior. Horrfying academic record coupled with a well-documented sense of disdain towards university education. Dad's friends' influence in getting him into the champagne unit of the Texas Air National Guard. Failure to show up for duty. Refusing direct orders to report for a physical. Failure to be sent to Vietnam via the Army for refusing said order, which happened to other officers who did not obey orders. Failures of his "businesses". His involvement in the real estate deal in which land granted to build a baseball stadium was instead sold off to build profitable developments, giving him his first real money with which to run for governor. The utter fiscal disaster left in Texas after his tax cuts there. The collapse of the Texas school system, with his blessing. The funeral industry scandal that he involved himself in. The amazing elevation of a no-account dunderhead to governor and then President in less than five years. His daughters: the restauranteur who carded the twins was weeks later ruined by inspectors - business lost as retribution. The retribution against the man who outed the Bush's national guard record - his veterans benefits canceled as he dies from a viral infection caught in service. The vile accusations against McCain in 2000. the unbelieveable memetic attack against Gore in 2000. The Bush brothers control of the electoral process in Florida in 2000. The recount blockage. The fake "riot" in Dade county against election officials, rioters composed of RNC staffers. The shutdown of environmental laws. Of the Microsoft case. The unbelieveable failure to read critical material before 9-11 warning of the attack. the four-year campaign to block the investigation of such. The utilization of a sad, small attack by a couple of dozen fanatics to convince Americans they were at war with Iraq, Iran, Europe, and anyone who looked at us funny. The complete failure to capture the man who actually attacked us. The illegal imprisonment of anyone who looked useful in making the dope look competent in waging war. The flauting of the law in imprisonment and torture of anyone they felt like. Ignoring the Supreme Court in refusing a fair hearing to those tortured. The suppression of the torture news. The suppression of any news that they made inaccurate statement about "evidence" of Saddam Hussein's involvement in the 9-11 idiots' attack. The complete restructuring of the U.S. into a police state, ongoing. Refusing to answer questions put to him by the press. Declarations that the press was an "interest group", and as such, could be ignored or lied to. Creation of special civilian "intellence" filters that culled "facts" from the CIA biomass that the President could use to invade a non-combatant nation.The setup later to blame the CIA for the information they themselves filtered and massaged, and therefore take direct control of ALL intel agencies. War crimes against a non-hostile nation. Imprisonment of citizens of a non-hostile nation. Torture of citizens of a non-hostile nation. Coverup of same. Successful attempts, through RNC-sympathetic corporate board members at GE, Disney, Viacom and AOL-Time-Warner, to "Red State" or "Nascarize" the news operations of NBC, ABC, CBS and CNN, now ongoing as the Brokow, Jennings, and Rathers are being expunged simultaneously along with all non-right-wing thinkers. The current run-up to invade Iran. The destruction of Social Security by tax cuts. The future elimination of public education by the deaths of a thousand cuts to advance a religious and private school system. Censorship. State religion. The complete restructuring of the judiciary to a Chicago-
Re:Slashdotted Already?-Weaving the Web. (Score:4, Insightful)
For a long time now I've noticed most "discussion" is so far off topic and so predictably childish and pointless, that there is no reason to even come here anymore.
Blah.
Re:What claim? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I heard this story from someone who was there (Score:1, Insightful)
"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
Now reporters saying that "Gore said he invented the internet" is not too far fetched. Sure, created might have been better but so what (not nearly the worst summary I have ever seen by a reporter....)
Note that Gore didn't say he supported the legislation that funded it. Indirectly, in the next sentence, yes, but not directly. Gore set himself up for this-he knew reporters would likely summarize his statement (he wasn't new to the game) and he overreached and got burned.
And note what you said:
"and that the funding Gore helped push through Congress was critical to the project."
In any case, it probably would have happened without him. Look, I know why he made the quote-in the Congress you are not seen as directly responsible for any piece of legislation even if you were critical to it. So you have to make it known. Unlike the president who gets to sign every piece of legislation (see, I supported it....) Legislation is a team sport, when it is good everyone likes to take credit, when it is bad, nobody is responsible...
Cake; having and eating (Score:4, Insightful)
They ignore conservative "judicial activism", such as making corporations legal individuals back in the 1880s or so, or the more recent remark by Justice Scalia, in the Texas case which gave homosexuals the right to privacy as regards sex in their own bedrooms; where even he admitted the legal reasoning was valid but he voted against it on the grounds it would upset the current conservative moral agenda.
Is that not the definition of judidical activism?
Re:"Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet" (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, most intelligent people know he was talking about funding. But that quote is exactly what he said in an interview with Wolf Blitzer. Read the transcript here: http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/03/09/ president.2000/transcript.gore/index.html [cnn.com]
Was the quote blown out of proportion? You bet. But Gore should have been clever and said "funding the Internet" or "creating the Internet community'" or anything like that.
Not true. (Score:3, Insightful)
Many people in politicas and governm,ent did not want that to happen, but Al GOre used his political power, took a political risk, and signed the paper the made ARPAnet public.
It was named the internet.
So politicaly, he did create the internet. Which is fine becasue he is a politician. At no time did he take credit for the technical aspects of the Internet, on the political.
Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf acknowledge in a paper titled "Al Gore and the Internet" that Al Gore has probably done more than any other elected official to support the growth and development of the Internet from the 1970's to the present.
the worse part is, people who didn't even bother to try to understand the context used this to hurts Gores election. Which would have been fine if he was running against someone who wasn't a drug using, handicapped frying, dumb ass.
Re:Al Gore's Internet (Score:3, Insightful)
>stupid. Clearly, he's smart enough to get through
>grad school (even with a C average), be the
>governor of a large state, and become the
>president of the US.
Yeah. God knows the billions of dollars his family is worth or their connections to leaders of the Republican Party like Charles Schultz had absolutely nothing to do with it . .
W's sole skill in life involves having plopped out of a well-financed cunt.
Re:wow, irony (Score:4, Insightful)
Look, if a Senator drafts legislation that provides funding for road work in his precinct, he will (justifiably) say "I fixed the roads in the great State of Montana!"
Did the Senator get in a piece of earth moving equipment and do road work? Obviously not. But no one jumps on him and calls him a liar.
The thing which we call "the Internet", defined by its use by civilians, exists because of the legislation, introduced by Gore, that funded it. You can say it was already created at that point, and I ridicule that assertion - this happened in *1989* - it was in the process of being created, and DARPA had defunded it. Gore "took the initiative", and introduced legislation that allowed others to finish creating the Internet.
He didn't use the verb create - he used the present progressive "creating".
If Gates were to say "I took the initiative in adding XXX feature to Internet Explorer" - the fact that he does none of the work himself makes no difference. The *initiative* is still his.
Re:I heard this story from someone who was there (Score:3, Insightful)
It IS far-fetched; as well as being a lie. Gore made one ambiguously worded statement, that is arguably true, and it was rewritten to make him sound like an idiot (by conservatives with an axe to grind) and repeated and headlined till it became a label. The word "invented" is the one that draws blood, and he never said it.
Re:I heard this story from someone who was there (Score:3, Insightful)
What do you mean "not far fetched"? It's plain wrong and that is all there is to it. "Initiative to create" can easily mean "decided to actually have it built, from the newly existing technology". "Invented" can not.
In any case, it probably would have happened without him
Eventually, but it could easily have taken years. Not that many suit-clad parent-generation politicians back then saw the potential clearly enough to actually go push for it.