Who Really Invented the Internet? 497
jaymzter writes "The Wall Street Journal is running an article that it claims seeks to dispel an urban legend about the internet: 'The creation of the Arpanet was not motivated by considerations of war. The Arpanet was not an Internet.' The position of the piece is that it was Xerox's contribution of Ethernet that enabled the global series of tubes we know and love today, and what's interesting is that the former head of DARPA supports this claim."
twisted pair, twisted logic (Score:5, Insightful)
Why exactly do we need to pay continual homage to Xerox? To create more urban legends instead of dispel and dismiss them?
Conservative opinion piece (Score:5, Insightful)
"See, it was never the government who created the Internet. The Free Market (peace be upon it) did it all by its lonesome!".
Color me shocked that a Murdoch paper's using that line.
nobody (Score:3, Insightful)
Every generation of teenagers thinks they invented sex and music.... and the internet.
We used to laugh at "al gore invented the internet" but the next generation of people will laugh at "zuckerberg invented the internet"
The other problem is there is no "internet". No one thing you can point at. Who invented "the space shuttle" as one individual inventing one object is an equally dumb question.
Another problem is best displayed by analogy. Who invented God? There's 10000 religions all saying they did, and the other 9999 got it all wrong and the 9999 others are all going to hell. Odds are all 10000 got it wrong not just 9999. Or another great analogy, at least to educated people: Who caused the decline and fall of the roman empire?
Crazy Talk Follows (Score:5, Insightful)
How about this: it was thousands of individuals, working both in the public and private sector on different pieces of the puzzle, when all taken together, who developed the Internet.
And then it gets crazier: if any of those pieces were missing, the same problems would have been present, and they would have been solved in similar but slightly different ways. If not for ARPANET, perhaps Project Xanadu would have yielded a working model, and something like IP would have been developed to make the networking work.
And to top it off: regardless, the state of the Internet at any particular point is largely a function of the available computing power. Moore's Law is highly resistant to challenge, and it's unlikely that any major change of players would have affected the outcome much. My BBS'ing days on a C=64 with a 300-baud modem might have had hypertext in the Xanadu model, but it still would have been an 8-bit experience.
In summary: there are stupid questions, like "who really invented the Internet?"
Re:Conservative opinion piece (Score:1, Insightful)
Nice falsehood there, but here's the articles actual thesis, summed up by Blogger Brian Carnell in 1999: "The Internet reaffirms the basic free market critique of large government. Here for 30 years the government had an immensely useful protocol for transferring information, TCP/IP, but it languished. . . . . In less than a decade, private concerns have taken that protocol and created one of the most important technological revolutions of the millennia."
Pretty good summation. Look at Amtrak versus the airlines. Amtrak has basically sat in a state of non-innovation since 1980 with ticket prices remaining high (~$1000 for a cross country journey), while the airlines have developed planes that practically fly & land themselves (via GPS) and at a cost of just $200-300 cross country..... much much less than what the same flight cost in 1980. "Government..... languished." Private concerns innovated in the face of competition (or else die out).
Exactly, Ford didn't invent the car (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:twisted pair, twisted logic (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole point of the Arpanet layer model is that you could pop any transmission technology you wanted into layers 1 and 2 and you could still get connectivity over disparate networks, providing layers 3 and up could be made to work. Ethernet is certainly common in LANs, but considering you can't get more than 500 feet without boosting signal, it's an absurd claim to state that Ethernet was the start of the Internet.
Re:Lightly Veiled Attack on Obama (Score:0, Insightful)
"is no better than Fox News"
Isn't it interesting how you just assume that everyone agrees with you.
You do understand that FNC consistently has the highest ratings of the lot don't you?
The truth, therefore, is that you are in the minority. How do you like that?
http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/category/ratings
Re:Crazy Talk Follows (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Conservative opinion piece (Score:3, Insightful)
"Private concerns innovated in the face of competition (or else die out)."
Or, in the case of the airlines, they get bailed out.
Not to mention the massive gov't subsidies in the form of infrastructure, both physical (airports) and regulatory (FAA), that make safe, efficient air travel possible in the first place.
Re:twisted pair, twisted logic (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps because prior to Ethernet, most communications were either serial, or proprietary. They were the first standard and widely adopted interconnect protocol.
Not really relevant to the 'internet', though. Yes, there were some slow, and/or expensive, and/or dreadful networking mechanisms that were pushed out of the local network scene by ethernet; but the internet's interesting characteristics are all at higher layers in the network model, and can be run on top of all sorts of interfaces without any operationally visible differences. Ethernet pretty much dominates on the LAN side at this point; but large chunks of the internet on a wider area still run on non-ethernet interfaces of various flavors, and IP packets don't give a damn...
Re:Conservative opinion piece (Score:5, Insightful)
We are talking about the same airline industry that got $5 billion in government bailouts and $10 billion in loan guarantees in 2001? And we are also going to ignore all the chapter 11 bankruptcy filings from airliners, correct?
Re:Conservative opinion piece (Score:5, Insightful)
Great stuff, that free-market non-government GPS, isn't it?
I have nothing against the Free Market. Nor have anything against the government. I have something against people who feel that it must be all of one and none of the other, or that either can stand on its own feet, unaided.
Specifically on-topic, There was over a decade of the Free Market thrashing around trying to create "The Information Service." I know, because at various times I used several of them. They all failed, because they all wanted to own the entire pie, and none of them could. The internet walked in and simply wiped them all away. The only way any of them could even dream of surviving was to participate in the internet - to become an internet access point - an ISP. The internet succeeded BECAUSE nobody owned the whole pie, not in spite of it.
In a more enlightened place, maybe industry could have come together and done that. But that's not the USA of the 1980's and early 1990's.
Re:twisted pair, twisted logic (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that ethernet as a WAN protocol didn't emerge until well after the Internet was up and running. The Internet started on serial/TDM protocols, which by the way, were very standardized, albeit with the usual US/euro dichotomy.
Re:they don't want to admit govt spending created (Score:5, Insightful)
It did not start to grow "MASSIVELY" until private industry got into it. There were not even ISPs then, because they were private industry. Just shut up and watch your compuserv.
It didn't start to grow "massively" until it was popularized by the World Wide Web. Who invented that? An Englishman working at that well known bastion of free market Americana: CERN in Switzerland.
Re:Conservative opinion piece (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, roman_mir and cpu6502, this should be a free-market fest...
Gov't is a process by which wealth is transferred from people who make it to people who can take it by force.
Or, governmet is a process which stops people without wealth from taking it (by force) from those who make it.
IOW, oversimplyfying is stupid.
The market is concerned with
The market is concerned with nothing. It has not brain, no leader nothing. Everything is an emergent property. When markets are efficient, they have proven to be the best known way of doing things. In other cases, they have failed utterly.
Your q=line about the market being concerned about getting good stuff to people at the best prices is rubbish. There is no concern. The market players are generally concerned with maximizing profit. Often this works well. Someties it does not.
Gov't isn't about making
Government is about the rule of law without which the market as you know it would not exist.
Gov't isn't looking for solutions to problems, it's not the goal, that's what free market capitalism does.
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what free market capitalism is. The only problem the players try to solve is how to maximize profit. Often "solutions to problems" emerge, but not always.
Re:twisted pair, twisted logic (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed.
The final answer is: Government invented the internet, no matter what the dangerously right-wing Wall Street Journal falsely believes.
Seriously, the WSJ loves business too much. It needs to learn that business are the MOST dependent on government. The richer you are, the more dependent you are on government, since a larger portion of your wealth derives from government activities.
A poor person does not need a highway system, schools, or an army. Poor people do not give a fuck.
A rich person needs a highway so their employees can get to work and deliver products to customers. They need schools so their employees can read instructions. They need armies to control resources. They need courts & police to enforce these rules.
ALL of government was designed to make people rich, and this is why we liberals tax the wealthy more than the poor. It used to be a nice 70% income tax rate for the rich, before Reagan gave all the dumbassess a false sense of hope that they too can be rich if they work hard. Um no, not everyone can be rich. Dumb people cannot be rich, no matter how hard they work. And, rich people need to pay the benefits of dumb people, so that they can continue to be rich.
The smaller government, the poorer the people. The bigger the government, the richer the people.
Meanwhile, the worst part is the SEO-optimized headline "Who really invented the internet" that'll cause Googlers to reach this page, falsely thinking that businesses somehow invented the internet. Someone really needs to un-SEO this article.
Re:twisted pair, twisted logic (Score:2, Insightful)
A snarky person might say we all got together on March 9, 1999, and Al Gore gave Al Gore the credit.
(And yes, I know he said "created" not "invented".)
Re:Conservative opinion piece (Score:4, Insightful)
And so are the airline's prices. Your point?
Re:twisted pair, twisted logic (Score:5, Insightful)
The vast majority of new businesses fail in this country. So if you have 2 businesses in a business park. One is wildly successful and the other goes bankrupt after a couple of years. The same road runs in front of both businesses. They both have the same mail service. They both have the same internet piped into their office suites. Who is PRIMARILY responsible for the business that succeeds? Is it the government or the owner?
Re:twisted pair, twisted logic (Score:5, Insightful)
So I have a question that maybe you can answer.
The vast majority of new businesses fail in this country. So if you have 2 businesses in a business park. One is wildly successful and the other goes bankrupt after a couple of years. The same road runs in front of both businesses. They both have the same mail service. They both have the same internet piped into their office suites. Who is PRIMARILY responsible for the business that succeeds? Is it the government or the owner?
I pose a question in response to your question: What about the business in Somalia that never got off the ground because there were no clean roads, no mail service, and the bribes to keep the warlords from stealing all of your good and killing your workers is too high.
The fact is, without the fundamentals, establishing a successful venture is astronomically more difficult - how many successful large-scale businesses existed in the middle ages (which is pretty much what Somalia looks like today, but with modern weaponry)?
Yes, the successful business owner deserves credit - just nowhere near as much as Wall St. (and their lackeys in office) think they do. Take that same business, move them to Somalia (hell, even some run down parts of major metropolitan areas), and give them a week or two before the venture completely implodes.
The Facts (Score:5, Insightful)
1) "The Internet" was invented by Vint Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine who worked for Stanford University and issued RFC 675 "SPECIFICATION OF INTERNET TRANSMISSION CONTROL PROGRAM" [ietf.org], and they were funded by ARPA.
2) Lots of other people and organizations developed lots of networks. ARPANET between University of California, Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute (funded by ARPA). There was also privately operated Telenet & Tymnet, and university lead MERIT networks as well as UUCP started at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
3) I worked for one of the first private Internet Service Providers - tt was also one of the first providers of dial-up shell accounts, and later had one of the first national DS-3 IP networks. When I started cold-calling people for web design, they often told me "My customers will never use the Internet" (if they even knew what the Internet was). Suffice it to say that a lot of very forward-looking private providers of capital made that company possible, and they all made a lot of money in the process, and that turned the Internet from something you tinkered with at University into something real.
Also look at private companies like Cisco that made IP routing practical at large scales.
So I will 100% agree that government funding of university researchers created the Internet. However it would have never gone anywhere without private money funding a massive expansion and buildout of it.
Think university solar cell research funded by the government - good. Solyndra funded by government - bad.
And it would have also gone NOWHERE if government tried to regulate early ISPs as roughly as it regulated the incumbent telecommunications companies. We could do pretty much whatever we wanted with little regulation or censorship.
Re:twisted pair, twisted logic (Score:4, Insightful)
Did he supply handles, or were people engaged in anal-gazing on a biblical scale in order to back up a dishonest meme?
Like ragging Gore for saying he accompanied the director of FEMA to a hurricane disaster area because he wasn't on the same physical plane?
Like ragging Gore because the girl without a desk had one the next week - but only because another student had to stand in her place? The latter detail left out of the storyline, of course.
And again, this was all in the same election where Gore's opponent was given a free pass on taking credit for passing legislation that he actually vetoed as governor of Texas.