The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating article as to who really built the internet in response to the claims the government than did it which are being presented by Obama supporters in a futile attempt to defend the President’s bizarre statement “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
So who did it? It was Bush. Just kidding sorta, Gordon Crovitz traces the internet to Vannevar Bush who initiated the Manhattan Project and founded Raytheon, who wrote an article in 1946 that appeared in The Atlantic that predicted the WorldWideWeb.
Of course, that’s not the invention.
The invention was by Xerox in the 1970s which developed ethernet to link different computer networks (IOW inter-net) which was unlike the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPA) that was just a single network.
Crovitz does note that it was Vincent Cerf who developed TCP/IP, the protocol that is the backbone of the internet — yes Cerf was working with the government when he did it — and Tim Berners-Lee who created Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that is the backbone of the WorldWideWeb while working at CERN a multinational government-funded organization.
Of course, Berners-Lee was famously using a very non-government-funded NeXT cube — the computer designed by Steve Jobs after he was forced from Apple — when he wrote HTTP.
Perhaps, Obama meant to say that if “the government does something, it is a business that makes it happen.”
