[dba-Tech] Who Invented the Internet?

Dang!  Thanks for the good catch!
T

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

On 7/25/2012 12:48 PM, DJK (John) Robinson wrote:
> Dangling *prepositions* are one thing up with which we will not put!  ;-)
>
> John
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Tina Norris
> Fields
> Sent: 25 July 2012 17:23
> To: Discussion of Hardware and Software issues
> Subject: Re: [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?.
>>
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