Al Gore and the Internet revisited

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From The Team That Put the Net into Orbit by John Markoff in today's New York Times -

IN the 2000 election, Al Gore, then the vice president, was derided by opponents who claimed that he had said he “created” the Internet. But many of the scientists, engineers and technology executives who gathered here to celebrate the Web’s birth say he played a crucial role in its development, and they expressed bitterness that his vision had been so discredited.

Mr. Gore had been instrumental in introducing legislation, beginning in 1988, to finance what he originally called a “national data highway.”

“Our corporations are not taking advantage of high-performance computing to enhance their productivity,” Mr. Gore, then a senator, said in an interview at the time. “With greater access to supercomputers, virtually every business in America could achieve tremendous gains.”

Ultimately, in 1991, his bill to create a National Research and Education Network did pass. Funded by the National Science Foundation, it was instrumental in upgrading the speed of the academic and scientific network backbone leading up to the commercialized Internet.

“He is a hero in this field,” said Lawrence H. Landweber, a computer scientist at the University of Wisconsin who in 1980 made the pioneering decision to use the basic TCP/IP Internet protocol for CSNET, an academic network that preceded NSFnet and laid the foundation for “internetworking.”

[Deja Q]

1. Yup. Helps immensely in offshoring too.

:7

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2. If the dollar falls as much as some here imagine it will,

American workers might enjoy some benefits from that.

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3. I'll kick it once more, just because I loathe the old lies about this.