Re: Who invented the intranet?

[Rob Streitkraft]

The original idea was Bob Taylor’s.  The documented year was 1966. And before we point fingers and try to conceptualize and parse terminologies to pump ourselves into fame.. the Internet, before it was the “Internet” was simply an “Intranet” during initial testing, and it was built by Larry Roberts.  The first network was a 4-node, packet switched configuration.    Others that contributed to the first network included:   Wes Clark, who was responsible for the idea of a a separate computer to handle communications, then called an Interface Message Processor;  Bolt Beranek and Newman Consulting, of Cambridge, MA, who won the bid because IBM claimed a network such as the internet couldn’t be built;  Bob Kahn, a networking theorist;  Dave Walden, a programmer; and Severo Ornstein, a super guru hardware wonk.   After the original intranet was torn down, the first Communications Processor ( built from a Honeywell computer ) was crated up and send to a the other side of the US, to UCLA.  This was the first node of the expanding internet.  And a group of graduate students, Vint Cerf, Jon Postel, Steve Crocker and Bill Naylor, were the ones responsible for connecting the IMP to UCLA’s host computer.  The faculty member overseeing this group of young, future internet heros was Len Kleinrock.   Doug Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse and the concept of windows (well before this, incase anyone has any ideas about claims here ) , worked on the second node of the internet to be set up at SRI in Menlo Park, and Roland Bryan worked on the third at UC Santa Barbara.   Postel wrote the first telnet program, Crocker was the Chair of the NWG, the first attempt at a standards body, Cerf and Kahn invented TCP/IP (which of course was also tested locally as an ‘intranet” before deployment.)  And the rest is pretty much history.   Novell probably has the strongest claim on the word “Intranet” though, for those only concerned about syntax parsing, and they have been using the term to describe their network software since the addition of TCP/IP and other features to their product.   As far as your claim,  so all you have to do now is roll the clock on your claim back to before 1966 and you can probably get away with convincing someone at a bar that you are an obscure geek that invented the intranet (right after Al Gore invented the internet.)