On Thursday, March 20, 2003, at 07:57 PM, Frank Hammitt wrote:
> Irrespective of anyone's political persuasion
> http://www.truthorfiction.com is usually a good source of information.
> Al?s ordeal is in there
> at http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/goreinternet.htm.
I find that site to be not untruthful, but committing sins of omission.
This bit of political propaganda has long irritated me because it is a
purposeful misinterpretation of his statement started by the Washington
Times and then spread by other partisans during the election campaign.
It was repeated endlessly by Rush Limbaugh and others of his persuasion
without any qualification.
His actual statement was:
"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative
in creating the Internet."
When he arrived in Congress, the ARPANET existed. It was a relatively
small (by today's standards) high-speed network originally intended to
support military research. It mostly connected universities and
military research institutions. There was also BITNET, a
store-and-forward system that ran in the background of some corporate
networks, notably IBM and ATT.
ARPANET was quite restricted and BITNET was pretty clunky. I used both
of them for years. Neither was anything like what arrived when the
Internet was formed, although the ARPANET used the protocols--mostly
defined by Vinton Cerf--that later came to be known as TCP/IP.
Gore arranged the hearings, wrote and sponsored the legislation which
expanded the ARPANET into the Internet of today. It was much the same
way a politician takes credit for building a road without doing any of
the digging. There was strong opposition from some quarters to his
initiatives.
Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, two of the generally acknowledged
inventors of the Internet, wrote:
"The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting
the Internet long before most people were listening. We feel it is
timely to offer our perspective. As far back as the 1970s Congressman
Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine
for both economic growth and the improvement of our
educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the
potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just
improving the conduct of science and scholarship."
On September 1, 2000, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich addressed the
American Political Science Association. Nobody can claim Gingrich is
not a partisan on the other side of most issues from Gore, yet he said:
"In all fairness, it?s something Gore had worked on a long time. Gore
is not the Father of the Internet, but in all fairness, Gore is the
person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure
that we got to an Internet, and the truth is?-and I worked with him
starting in 1978 when I got [to Congress], we were both part of a
"futures group"-?the fact is, in the Clinton administration, the world
we had talked about in the eighties began to actually happen."
| The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will
| be March 25. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>.
