In an earlier thread when I was congratulating 01 XLT Sport for reaching new posting levels, I never thought that he would shortly thereafter turn to posting so viciously against the Left...

...yes I did.

 

Gore stated all by himself like a big boy: “I took the initiative in creating the Internet”

This thread was just started in fun, really…

I seen it on a web site about a man getting $1.2 million for “inventing” the Internet and thought it would be some fun…

Algore said what he said, just like Kerry voted FOR the $87 billion before he voted AGAINST it, and just like Dean really did scream even though Dean states that he didn’t…


I just can NOT make this stuff up…

 

Yeah, shame on you Burt.

You never see liberals making fun of GW do you?

 

Well, since you DID see the article, I suppose it just brought some bad memories for you, like when you thought Al might get elected. There is surely more to pick on Al about.

 

No, not really any bad memories, just fond memories…


However Kerry and Dean are filling his shoes just fine for the moment…

 

Re-Defeat Bush in 2004

 

LMAO…


That’s funny, all them rascally liberals still can not accept that every single re-count in Florida has shown that President Bush won the state…


Oh well the myth continues…

 

Come on, thats the electoral college for you, all brought to you by our founding fathers who just didn't trust their country men to directly vote for the president. 200 some years later the people of Florida indeed proved them right that they are just to dumb to vote correctly.

Well since our electoral process obviously isn't working I suggest that we return to something a little simpler. In November, on the eve of the election GWB and John Kerry get locked in a cargo container overnight (if you watch the Sheild you know what I'm talking about) and whoever comes out alive in the morning wins the presidency. Sort of like Thunderdome, two men enter, one man leaves!

Although its old the Al Gore and his invention of the internet still make me laugh. Any politician worth his salt should know its not what you meant that is heard, it is what you said.

 

Here's another Myth:

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft
Don't change horsemen
in the middle of an apocalypse

 

Only after a Republican discounted thousands of voters...

 

Prepare yourself.

Florida hasn't changed their voting procedures and those old people are four years older.

 

LOL

Thats a scary thought.

 

I think your confussed with the democrats throwing out thousands of votes from the Military overseas...

Who the hell are they to vote, it's not like they are protecting our right to even exist...

 

You mean they are going to remove registered voters if their names rhyme with a convicted felons names (only if they are Democrats) again?

 

Who 'created' the Internet? It's a tangled web.

Friday, October 20, 2000

By DAVID L. CHANDLER
THE BOSTON GLOBE


All right, let's get this straight: Who really did create the Internet?

Vice President Al Gore has been the butt of endless jokes for having taken credit for it. But what is the real story?

Unfortunately, although the question is simple and straightforward, the answer is not. Gore did provide early support for the technology -- even if he puffed up his role -- but computer pioneers can't even agree on exactly what the Internet is, let alone who created it.

Most historical accounts say the Internet was created in 1969, when the first network of widely separated computers was set up by the Defense Department to aid in computer research. It was called the ARPANET, and it was created by scientists at Bolt Beranek & Newman, or BB&N, in Cambridge, Mass., and at Stanford University, based on concepts described earlier by Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists J.C.R. Licklider and Leonard Kleinrock (and a few others).

Well, in a historical sense, that is a reasonable claim. But it's also a bit like saying the Interstate Highway System was created by the first Native Americans who blazed some of the trails the highways would later follow.

Some accounts suggest Robert Kahn of BB&N and Vinton Cerf of Stanford really laid the groundwork for the Internet explosion. The two computer scientists, who joined forces at the Advanced Research Programs Agency (the ARPA in ARPANET) spent most of the 1970s developing the transmission system for sending data between different networks of computers that were running incompatible operating systems.

The system (or rather systems) they developed, called TCP/IP (for Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol), was the technical achievement that made the Internet as we know it possible.

At the time, it was just a small network connecting relatively few huge university and research computers. Nobody foresaw the explosion of personal computers that was about to unfold.

But when most people think of the Internet, what they really have in mind is a combination of electronic mail (which evolved separately, and the World Wide Web (which came along much later, in 1991).

E-mail was developed in the 1970s as a way of sending messages within a company's or laboratory's internal computer network, and then was adapted to send messages between networks as well. But for the first two decades or so, it functioned much as the earliest telephones did.

There was a time when there were numerous telephone companies, each with their own wires and phones, none of them interconnected. If you wanted to be able to place calls to people on different systems, you needed a separate phone and telephone line for each one. In the early days of e-mail, people had exactly the same problem: many different e-mail systems, each using different software.

Gradually, "gateways" were created to allow people to send mail from one system to another. But it wasn't until the 1990s that virtually all e-mail began to flow through the Internet, using the now-standard "@" symbol followed by an Internet domain name (a naming system adopted in 1984) to define their addresses. That convention, and especially the ubiquitous @ sign, are credited to Ray Tomlinson of BB&N, who wrote one of the pioneering e-mail programs in 1972.

Through the 1980s and early 1990s, as personal computers soared from a curiosity owned mostly by techie hobbyists and a few companies to a widespread commodity, anyone wanting to link a computer to a network had to choose from among the many private network systems available -- Delphi, CompuServe, Prodigy, Genie, Bix and a host of others. None allowed any connection to the world outside the individual network and its subscribers.

In addition, the Internet was still strictly limited to use on college campuses and in research labs.

What changed?

That's where Al Gore comes in.

Gore was widely credited in histories written long before the vice president's oft-derided comment that he "took the initiative in creating the Internet."

Gore is credited by the technological cognoscenti for having sponsored legislation that helped launch the expansion of the fledgling Internet to ever-wider uses. As early as 1986, Gore articulated a vision of widespread connected computing, and later introduced a follow-up bill to expand access to the network.

None of these histories comes close to giving him credit for the "creation" of the Internet. One account, written by Vinton Cerf, states: "I think the vice president is very deserving of credit for his active support for the Internet and the businesses that depend on it daily."

But the person responsible for what most people think of as "the Internet" came along even later in the process. Until 1991, the only ways to use the Internet (other than for sending e-mail) were to use programs such as FTP (File Transfer Protocol). This allowed you to "log on" to another computer, and then to download files. But first, you had to know the exact "domain name" or address of the computer you wanted to access. You also had to have an account name and password for that specific computer.

Then came Tim Berners-Lee, a computer programmer at the European Center for Particle Research, or CERN, in Geneva. He devised a system that would allow people to access information simply by clicking on a "link" within a document. The link itself would contain all the necessary information about where the file was, so that, from the user's point of view, it made no difference if the file were coming from a computer down the hall or around the world.

That breakthrough concept was something Berners-Lee, now a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, dubbed the World Wide Web, or WWW. It was he who created the system of Internet addresses that begin with the now-familiar "http://" (which stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol) and the language used to create Web pages, HTML (or HyperText Markup Language).

That system was finalized in 1991, which in practical terms can be thought of as the birth of the Internet as we know it today. The ban on commercial use was finally lifted later that year.

OK, so who was the "creator" of the Internet? Cerf himself describes it thus: "I consider Bob Kahn and myself to be the principal fathers of the specific design, but we were very dependent on the work of others."

In short, Cerf says, "I don't think it makes sense to give any one person such a title."

[EDIT] This is for Raoul: STEVEN EPPINGER