[dba-Tech] Who Invented the Internet?

Thanks for that fascinating and revealing story.  The Xerox blindness 
resembles a blindness I see all around me, and fear I am also sometimes 
subject to.  (Sorry about the dangling participle.)
T

Tina Norris Fields
tinanfields at torchlake.com
231-322-2787

On 7/25/2012 8:37 AM, Arthur Fuller wrote:
> Gordon Crovitz: Who Really Invented the Internet?Contrary to legend, it
> wasn't the federal government, and the Internet had nothing to do with
> maintaining communications during a war.
>
> A telling moment in the presidential race came recently when Barack Obama
> said: "If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made
> that happen." He justified elevating bureaucrats over entrepreneurs by
> referring to bridges and roads, adding: "The Internet didn't get invented
> on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all companies
> could make money off the Internet."
>
> It's an urban legend that the government launched the Internet. The myth is
> that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communications lines up
> even in a nuclear strike. 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."
>
> That fired imaginations, and by the 1960s technologists were trying to
> connect separate physical communications networks into one global network—a
> "world-wide web." The federal government was involved, modestly, via the
> Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Its goal was not
> maintaining communications during a nuclear attack, and it didn't build the
> Internet. Robert Taylor, who ran the ARPA program in the 1960s, sent an
> email to fellow technologists in 2004 setting the record straight: "The
> creation of the Arpanet was not motivated by considerations of war. The
> Arpanet was not an Internet. An Internet is a connection between two or
> more computer networks."
>
> 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.
>
> Enlarge Image
> [image: image]
> [image: image]
> Xerox PARC
>
> Xerox PARC headquarters.
>
> But full credit goes to the company where Mr. 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.
>
> According to a book about Xerox PARC, "Dealers of Lightning" (by Michael
> Hiltzik), its top researchers realized they couldn't wait for the
> government to connect different networks, so would have to do it
> themselves. "We have a more immediate problem than they do," Robert
> Metcalfe told his colleague John Shoch in 1973. "We have more networks than
> they do." Mr. Shoch later recalled that ARPA staffers "were working under
> government funding and university contracts. They had contract
> administrators . . . and all that slow, lugubrious behavior to contend
> with."
>
> So having created the Internet, why didn't Xerox become the biggest company
> in the world? The answer explains the disconnect between a government-led
> view of business and how innovation actually happens.
>
> Executives at Xerox headquarters in Rochester, N.Y., were focused on
> selling copiers. From their standpoint, the Ethernet was important only so
> that people in an office could link computers to share a copier. Then, in
> 1979, Steve Jobs negotiated an agreement whereby Xerox's venture-capital
> division invested $1 million in Apple, with the requirement that Jobs get a
> full briefing on all the Xerox PARC innovations. "They just had no idea
> what they had," Jobs later said, after launching hugely profitable Apple
> computers using concepts developed by Xerox.
>
> Xerox's copier business was lucrative for decades, but the company
> eventually had years of losses during the digital revolution. Xerox
> managers can console themselves that it's rare for a company to make the
> transition from one technology era to another.
>
> As for the government's role, the Internet was fully privatized in 1995,
> when a remaining piece of the network run by the National Science
> Foundation was closed—just as the commercial Web began to boom. Blogger
> Brian Carnell wrote in 1999: "The Internet, in fact, reaffirms the basic
> free market critique of large government. Here for 30 years the government
> had an immensely useful protocol for transferring information, TCP/IP, but
> it languished. . . . In less than a decade, private concerns have taken
> that protocol and created one of the most important technological
> revolutions of the millennia."
>
> It's important to understand the history of the Internet because it's too
> often wrongly cited to justify big government. It's also important to
> recognize that building great technology businesses requires both
> innovation and the skills to bring innovations to market. As the contrast
> between Xerox and Apple shows, few business leaders succeed in this
> challenge. Those who do—not the government—deserve the credit for making it
> happen.
>
> *(Note: This column has been altered to correct the misattribution of Brian
> Carnell's quote.)*
>
> A version of this article appeared July 23, 2012, on page A11 in the U.S.
> edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Who Really Invented
> the Internet?.
>