I’m not really that upset or surprised over the argument that the government did (or did not) fund the Internet. I do realize that it really matters, but it’s a complex issue. The Internet was most successful because of a government and business partnership, which means that there’s always going to be a question of who did what. As a computing educator, I am more concerned that the article in the Wall Street Journal was so full of conceptual errors! Hyperlinks have nothing to do with the Internet. Ethernet is not the Internet. As my colleague Christine Alvarado said to me on Facebook, the WSJ piece is a symptom of a problem that even educated Americans do not understand the computing in our daily lives.
Cronkite then points out that TCP/IP, the fundamental communications protocol of the Internet, was invented by Vinson Cerf (though he fails to mention Cerf’s partner, Robert Khan . He points out that Tim Berbers Lee “gets credit for hyperlinks.” Lots of problems here. Cerf and Khan did develop TCP/IP–on a government contract! And Berbers Lee doesn't get credit for hyperlinks–that belongs to Doug Enlargeable of Stanford Research Institute, who showed them off in a legendary 1968 demo you can see here. Burners Lee invented the World Wide Web–and he did so at CERN, a European government consortium.
Cerf, by the way, wrote in 2009 that the ARPANet, on which he worked, “led, ultimately, to the Internet.” As for Ethernet, which Bob Metacafe and David Bogs invented at PARC (under Taylor’s watchful eye), that’s by no means a precursor of the Internet, as Cronkite contends. It was, and is, a protocol for interconnecting computers and linking them to outside networks–such as the Internet. And Metacafe drew his inspiration for the technology from ALOHANet, an ARPA-funded project at the University of Hawaii.
Deepa Singh
Business Developer
Web Site:-http://www.gyapti.com
Blog:- http://gyapti.blogspot.com
Email Id:-deepa.singh@soarlogic.com
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