COM125 Week 2: Oh, Al Gore.

Excerpt from March 1999 Interveiw with Wolf Blitzer on CNN's "Late Edition":

GORE: "Well, I will be offering -- I'll be offering my vision when my campaign begins. And it will be comprehensive and sweeping. And I hope that it will be compelling enough to draw people toward it. I feel that it will be.
But it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system."

Oh, Al Gore. Apparently he hadn't done his research on the internet which was actually conceived in the late 1960's when he was only 21 and still in college. The first recorded description of the social interactions that could be enabled through networking was a series of memos written by J.C.R. Licklider of MIT in August 1962 discussing his "Galactic Network" concept. He wanted to create a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site. A few years later, then referred to as ARPANET, or The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, was developed by members of the United States Department of Defense was the world's first operational packet switching network, and the birth of the global Internet as we know it. (Wikepedia.org)
The first link was created between the University of California LA, and Stanford Reaserch Institute on November 21st, 1969. By December, two more schools were added, and by 1981 a new "host" was being added every 20 days. (Where was Al Gore??)

After ARPANET had been around for a few years, it was handed over to the Department of Defense and was broken into a seperate network known as MILNET. In 1983, TCP/IP protocols replaced NCP as the principal protocol of the ARPANET, and the ARPANET became just one more piece in creating the modern Internet. By 1971, the first email was sent using the host, and in 1973 a file transfer was attempted but not completed.

Al Gore unfortunately will have to live with his statement for the rest of his life. And while the rest of us ponder the wonder of his invention, everyday new hosts, networks and information is added to our world wide web. Thank you, Mr. Gore.