>Everyone know that Al Gore invented the Internet. When is he being >knighted, and do they have a spot in the UK for him to live?
>From http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/31/0047251. Here's similar dialog >that resulted from TBL knighthood (and the Al Gore thing)..........m Berners-Lee >Attains Knighthood The Internet name had been used for this existing network for years before Gore ever got involved. Well, yes and no. The case of the first letter is significant here. The term "internet" was used in the ARPAnet community by the late 70's. But the term "Internet" was consciously introduced in the early 80's with a more precise meaning. There were a lot of early writings that attempted to make a distinction. An "internet" was more or less what we now call a LAN or an "intranet", a collection of machines using one or more types of comm hardware, with IP used to make them all play nice together. There were (and still are) many "internets". Each may consist of a number of different (hardware) networks, but at the IP level, they can be treated as a single network. The IP protocol intercedes for the software to make the hardware networks interoperate. The "Internet" was conceived as a top-level internet that connected all of them as a single world-wide network. This was significant not because it needed new technology, but because it was to be a permanent part of the world's communications, not under the control of any single agency or government. The significant innovation here was the idea of a permanent comm system with distributed, cooperating management. People in academia had talked about this, of course. But by the early 80's, it really hadn't been done. There was a world-wide ARPAnet, yes, and lots of little internets in different organizations. But their interconnections were partial and transitory. I well remember the frustrations of trying to send email from within one company or school to someone in another. At that time, the UUCP email system was often much more reliable, because its store-and-forward approach didn't depend on routing and permanent connections. Even today, with much of the Internet using transient dialup connections, email depends on a store-and-forward scheme, and most home machines and portables can't put things on the web, because they don't have permanent connections. So the Internet with a capital 'I' still hasn't really been fully implemented. Al Gore rightly deserves a lot of credit for funding development of "the Internet", which happened in the 80's. He can't take much credit for "internet" development, which happened mostly in the 70's. --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Find out what made the Top Yahoo! Searches of 2003
