Click here and you'll see a history of the internet.
So you've just learned alot? Now you understand where the internet has grown from... Okay on with the rolling stone interview... or part of it.
What did you actually have to do with the creation of the Internet?
In my first term in Congress - I was elected in 1976 - I began a series of meetings, under the rubric of a group called the Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future, between interested members of Congress and computer scientists, geneticists, futurists and others. It became apparent that the juice was in the information revolution. Computer-processing power was doubling every year and a half, but the transmission lines for information were still based on twisted copper. The number of bits per second was static, and it wasn't increasing; meanwhile, processing power was expanding geometrically, logarithmically, explosively.
That had particular significance for me, because, when I was ten, my father, who was the author of the Interstate Highway bill, often took me to the meetings of his committee that designed the interstate-highway system. And he often explained why it was such a major project for him. Our family used to drive back and forth, six or seven times a year, between Carthage, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C., on two-lane roads. I remember going from Carthage to Nashville at nighttime, on old Highway 70, and seeing a long line of red taillights stretching out for miles and miles and miles.
Years later, that analogy jumped out at me. Just as the proliferation of cars and trucks after World War II made the two-lane roads obsolete, the proliferation of personal computers and the growth of processing power - in the wake of the Apollo program - made the old two-lane information pathways obsolete. At least, prospectively obsolete. And in short order.
Did you imagine back then that there'd one day be a consumer use for the Internet?
Oh, yes. And I began evangelizing the idea of an information superhighway. There were a lot of others who did the work, who came up with the discoveries. And I never said I invented the Internet. But where the congressional role was concerned, I did take the lead. And I went beyond having hearings - I introduced legislation. I pushed big increases in the funding for research into how to expand the capacity of fiber-optic cable, how to develop supercomputers that were more powerful, how to develop the right switches and algorithms to handle the information flow. I went to talk with people who had the early networks - like DARPAnet, which was a tiny little Defense Department network on which the first e-messaging - they didn't have the term e-mail yet - was taking place.
I wrote a piece of legislation to establish something called NREN: the National Research Education Network. The idea behind it was to create large supercomputing centers, which didn't exist then - research centers that had leading-edge computer capacity - and then to link them with high-volume data links as a demonstration project to show what could happen.
In doing this, I went back and studied Congress' role in the development of the telegraph. Do you know the story of Samuel Morse? He was a portrait painter, and he was painting a portrait in the White House of President Franklin Pierce. And his wife, back in Virginia - later to be West Virginia - fell ill and, over a two-week period, died. The word did not get to him, because it had to come by horseback. Had he known, he would have been by his wife's side. He was consumed with guilt, as well as grief, and he thought, as an artist, "What could I do to make sure that nobody else feels this pain that I feel?" And he invented the telegraph. Anyway, the government's role was to build this demonstration line between Washington and Baltimore.
The NREN was a demonstration of what could be done. I always felt that once the capacity was demonstrated, it would grow out from the backbone, as other people wanted it. I also introduced the Super Computer Network Study Act, which created the laboratory where Marc Andreeson developed the first graphic Web browser. Most people didn't see the sense in this, because they had no experience with what the transmission of computerized data meant. I met with the last chairman of AT&T before it was dismantled - a guy named Charles Brown - and I tried to sell him on the idea of a project to vastly expand the information networks to handle this new computing. Mr. Brown had zero interest in this. More to the point, he had negative interest.
.....So as you can see he didn't invent the internet, but has been a supporter since the beginning. I hope this clears a few things up.
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