Who Really Invented the Internet? Hint: Not Government

[CuteOldGuy]

Despite President Obama's insistence that the government invented the internet for business, a lie that sounded nice in the moment when taken in context, the internet was invented at Xerox. Here's the story.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...008406518.html

[joe bloe]

Very interesting. Romney should talk about it in his speeches. I think Obama really stepped in it with his "you didn't build that" comment. He jumped the shark.

[CuteOldGuy]

I love the Obamatons twisting and turning, insisting the President was taken out of context. I wonder how they will spin this one.

[IIFFOFRDB]

Originally Posted by CuteOldGuy

Despite President Obama's insistence that the government invented the internet for business, a lie that sounded nice in the moment when taken in context, the internet was invented at Xerox. Here's the story.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...008406518.html

Thanks COG. The Dipshits will be here soon. Crack a cold one and savor the moment....fuckem

[WTF]

Oh yea....and the government did not go into outer space. The private sector did that innovation.


You numb nuts miss the whole point. It is like having a debate with ten Marshall clones. You do not believe in science, you think a man in the clouds invented earth, made Eve from a rib of Adam's. Talk about a bunch of cool aiders!

[CuteOldGuy]

That's what we call a "strawman". WTF does it so he can feel better about himself. God knows he has very little else going for him.

Say, WTF, what about the internet, and the President's lie about that? No answer. Change the subject.

Next?

[Fast Gunn]

You have to give credit where credit is due, but the lines there are often blurred.

Many inventions have their origins in the murky past where many people and organizations made partial contributions to their success.

You could say that it was really the Telegraph that was the precursor to the internet.

Yet even that relatively crude prototype had many people and many developments involved to make it finally work even as rudimentary as it was back then.

The internet is still evolving today and even in our own live times is has developed dramatically. The first computers were only simple toys and the first ISPs were very slow dial-ups

. . . The US government does deserve its share of credit for creating the environment where all these companies and inventors could build the internet. Such developments could not have happened in a country where people were starving or torn apart by war.

[WTF]

Originally Posted by CuteOldGuy

That's what we call a "strawman". WTF does it so he can feel better about himself. God knows he has very little else going for him.

Say, WTF, what about the internet, and the President's lie about that? No answer. Change the subject.

Next?

Did you even read the article? Do you understand how government research/funds are responsible for these things to happen? It is usually a combined effort. The government sinks funds into private companies to do the R&D. The article you linked says that the man responsible was employed by the, drum roll please......the GOVERNMENT. Yet you try and spin it as the "President lied". I highlighted parts for you from your article. You want me to come over and read it to you and then explain what it means?

The truth is a more interesting story about how innovation happens—and about how hard it is to build successful technology companies even once the government gets out of the way.
For many technologists, the idea of the Internet traces to Vannevar Bush, the presidential science adviser during World War II who oversaw the development of radar and the Manhattan Project. In a 1946 article in The Atlantic titled "As We May Think," Bush defined an ambitious peacetime goal for technologists: Build what he called a "memex" through which "wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified."

[Doove]

Originally Posted by CuteOldGuy

I love the Obamatons twisting and turning, insisting the President was taken out of context. I wonder how they will spin this one.

By yawning.

[joe bloe]

Originally Posted by Fast Gunn

You have to give credit where credit is due, but the lines there are often blurred.

Many inventions have their origins in the murky past where many people and organizations made partial contributions to their success.

You could say that it was really the Telegraph that was the precursor to the internet.

Yet even that relatively crude prototype had many people and many developments involved to make it finally work even as rudimentary as it was back then.

The internet is still evolving today and even in our own live times is has developed dramatically. The first computers were only simple toys and the first ISPs were very slow dial-ups

. . . The US government does deserve its share of credit for creating the environment where all these companies and inventors could build the internet. Such developments could not have happened in a country where people were starving or torn apart by war.

The most legitimate role for government funding of scientific research, that ultimately benefits the private sector, is in basic research. That is to say, research that is done to aquire scientific knowledge without knowing what the application of the knowledge will be.

The private sector does research with concerns for relatively short term benefits. By it's nature, the private sector is motivated by profit.

The super collider research being done in Switzerland is yielding breakthroughs in scientific knowlege that may someday change the way we live. The short term benefit is non-existant.

America is no longer on the cutting edge of super collider research because government funding was cut for a super collider that was being built in Waxahachie, Texas in 1993. The breakthroughs in high energy particle physics, now occurring in Switzerland, could have been in Texas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superco...Super_Collider

[WTF]

Originally Posted by joe bloe

. The breakthroughs in high energy particle physics now occurring in Switzerland could have been in Texas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superco...Super_Collider

Tea Nuts want smaller government. This is the result and will be so. This is what you do not want to acknowledge by spending cuts.

[CuteOldGuy]

Ok, WDF. You support bigger and more expansive government so business can thrive. That makes sense. I already skewered your notion in another thread.

Freedom causes business to thrive. Government can help by getting out of the way, and enforcing fraud and copyright laws. That is their only role.

[Fast Gunn]

We're getting a little off course here discussing the Super Collider, but you do make a valid point about government's role in the development of high technology.

It is a vital contribution that is often conveniently overlooked, dismissed or forgotten altogether as in the previous post.

It was unfortunate that Texas lost the Super Collider project, but it was due mainly because of project mismanagement and enormous cost escalation.

Such a huge project required a strong and dedicated leader to keep the teams focused, but they really weren't.

They were more concerned about building their little fiefdoms than in building the Super Collider and lost the project when they lost their vision.

. . . If the Super Collider team had had even half the dedication of the Manhattan Project, it would have been very successful.

Originally Posted by joe bloe

The most legitimate role for government funding of scientific research, that ultimately benefits the private sector, is in basic research. That is to say, research that is done to aquire scientific knowledge without knowing what the application of the knowledge will be.

The private sector does research with concerns for relatively short term benefits. By it's nature, the private sector is motivated by profit.

The super collider research being done in Switzerland is yielding breakthroughs in scientific knowlege that may someday change the way we live. The short term benefit is non-existant.

America is no longer on the cutting edge of super collider research because government funding was cut for a super collider that was being built in Waxahachie, Texas in 1993. The breakthroughs in high energy particle physics, now occurring in Switzerland, could have been in Texas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superco...Super_Collider

[Munchmasterman]

Tim Berner-Lee is the inventor of the World Wide Web.
http://1997.webhistory.org/historyday/abstracts.html

Also,



WSJ mangles history to argue government didn't launch the Internet

Confuses Ethernet, Internet, and the Web—and even misunderstands blockquotes.


by Timothy B. Lee - July 23 2012, 10:06am CDT
· History of Tech
227
"It's an urban legend that the government launched the Internet," writes L. Gordon Crovitz in Monday's Wall Street Journal, launching into just one of a myriad of problems with his short opinion piece.
While he concedes that the military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program funded the creation of the ARPAnet, the first large-scale packet-switched network, he argues that the government doesn't deserve credit for the creation of the Internet:
If the government didn't invent the Internet, who did? Vinton Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol, the Internet's backbone, and Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for hyperlinks.
But full credit goes to the company where [Robert Taylor] worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox. It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks. Researchers there also developed the first personal computer (the Xerox Alto) and the graphical user interface that still drives computer usage today.
Crovitz is right that Vinton Cerf, along with Bob Kahn, invented the TCP/IP protocol that is the foundation of the modern Internet. But he neglects to mention that Cerf's early work on the protocol was funded by the US military through its DARPA program.
"Hyperlinks" are not the Internet, and Tim Berners-Lee didn't invent them. Nor is the World Wide Web the Internet, although the Web has become such a popular Internet application that many people confuse the two. But more to the point, Berners-Lee was working at CERN, a research organization funded by European governments, when he invented the World Wide Web in the early 1990s.
Xerox is indeed a private company, and Xerox PARC researchers did develop some important computing technologies, including Ethernet and the graphical user interface. But it's not accurate to say that "the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks." Ethernet was designed primarily as a local networking technology to connect computers in a home or office. The point of the Internet's TCP/IP protocol was to allow networks using different standards, including Ethernet, to communicate with each other. Many of the networks that now comprise the Internet use the Ethernet protocol, but what makes the Internet the Internet is TCP/IP, not Ethernet.
Indeed, not only is Crovitz confused about the origins of the Internet, he also seems not to understand the conventions of the World Wide Web. He quotes George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen as saying that "The Internet, in fact, reaffirms the basic free market critique of large government." But that quote wasn't written by Cowen. It was quoted by Cowen in a 2005 blog post. The page Cowen was quoting has succumbed to bitrot, but the Internet Archive has a copy.
The Wall Street Journal has earned a reputation for producing in-depth and meticulously fact-checked news coverage. Unfortunately, it doesn't always apply that same high standard of quality to their editorial page.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/07/wsj-mangles-history-to-argue-government-didnt-launch-the-internet/

[CuteOldGuy]

It would surprise the hell out of me if Munchie understood what he posted. It would also surprise the hell out of me if anyone can decipher the point, if any, he was trying to make.