>From an article in Wired 17/10/00 The Mother of Gore's Invention by Declan McCullagh
...the truth is that Gore never did claim to have "invented" the Internet. During a March 1999 CNN interview, while trying to differentiate himself from rival Bill Bradley, Gore boasted: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." That statement was enough to convince me, with the encouragement of my then-editor James Glave, to write a brief article that questioned the vice president's claim. Republicans on Capitol Hill noticed the Wired News writeup and started faxing around tongue-in-cheek press releases -- inveterate neatnik Trent Lott claimed to have invented the paper clip -- and other journalists picked up the story too. My article never used the word "invented," but it didn't take long for Gore's claim to morph into something he never intended. The terrible irony in this exchange is that while Gore certainly didn't create the Internet, he was one of the first politicians to realize that those bearded, bespectacled researchers were busy crafting something that could, just maybe, become pretty important. In January 1994, Gore gave a landmark speech at UCLA about the "information superhighway." Many portions -- discussions of universal service, wiring classrooms to the Net, and antitrust actions -- are surprisingly relevant even today. (That's an impressive enough feat that we might even forgive Gore his tortured metaphors such as "road kill on the information superhighway" and "parked at the curb" on the information superhighway.) Gore's speech reverberated around Democratic political circles in Washington. Other Clinton administration officials began citing it in their own remarks, and the combined effort helped to grab the media's attention. Their timing was impeccable: In July 1993, according to Network Wizards' survey, there were 1.8 million computers connected to the Internet. By July 1994, the figure had nearly doubled to 3.2 million, a trend that continued through January 2000, when about 72 million computers had permanent network addresses. Small wonder, then, that as the election nears, Gore's defenders have been rallying to defend him. In a recent op-ed piece in the San Jose Mercury News, John Doerr and Bill Joy claim "nobody in Washington understands" the new economy as well as Gore does. Net-pioneers Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf, a Democratic party donor, have written an essay saying "no other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time" than the veep. Scott Rosenberg, in a recent Salon article, joined the fray: "The 'Gore claims he invented the Net' trope is so full of holes that it makes you wish there were product recalls for bad information." It's also true that, as a senator, Gore in the 1980s supported universities' efforts to increase funding for NSFNet, a measure that became law in the High Performance Computing Act of 1991. Gore's guest columns in Byte magazine at the time showed an appreciation of technology that was far from usual on Capitol Hill. -- The iMac List is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | - Epson Stylus Color 580 Printers - new at $69 | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> iMac List info: <http://lowendmac.com/imac/list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/imac-list%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
