Who invented the Internet?

Well, it certainly wasn't Al Gore who invented the Internet but here's what he said in a March 1999 TV interview with Wolf Blitzer: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." A questionable choice of words to be sure, but the real issue is what, if anything, did Gore actually have to do with the Internet. To his defense comes Vinton Cerf, one of several persons who have been called the "Father of the Internet." Cerf says, "The Internet would not be where it is in the United States today without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the Vice President in his current role and in his earlier role as Senator." Marc Andreesen, the inventor of the Mosaic browser, forerunner of the MS Explorer browser, agrees and credits Gore with making his work possible with a federal grant.

What we do know for sure is that Gore was largely responsible for the tax on your phone bill called the Universal Service Fee or simply the Gore tax. It was designed to help schools and libraries in poor and rural areas get affordable telecommunications and Internet services through subsidized discounts but has found itself suffering from corruption due to insufficient oversight. It's quite controversial so I'll leave it up to you google where it stands today. The tax will probably be on your phone bill forever along with the 1898 Spanish American war tax (Federal excise tax).

In 1962 I was transferred from Western Electric's Defense Projects in New York City to AT&T in Colorado Springs to continue planning communications for the Air Force's SAGE air defense system. It was the height of the cold war with Russia and survivability of communications in a nuclear war was a hot topic. Our office in Colorado Springs was working on moving the SAGE system into the AUTOVON switched network in '64 when the Air Defense Command sent a copy of Paul Baran's proposal for a survivable communications network to our office and asked for comments. I was given the task of reviewing the document.

Paul Baran's proposal was titled "On Distributed Communications" and consisted of 11 volumes One may see a summary at http://www.rand.org/publications/classics/baran.list.html.

Baran had a radical approach to communications and his concepts were exciting and futuristic. It was fun reading. He envisioned a network of unmanned nodes that routed digital information from one node to another to their final destinations. The nodes used a scheme Baran called "hot-potato routing" by dividing information into packets before sending them over the network just as Internet does today. Each packet would be sent separately and rejoined into a whole when received at the destination. Baran's objective, of course, was survivability of communications, made possible by so many paths available to packets at any instant of time

AT&T, however, was developing a "polygrid" AUTOVON network with hardened switches that could also survive a nuclear attack so the official AT&T reply to the Air Force was that the company was not interested in Baran's approach. It is ironic that today, all telecommunications, including the public switched network, is moving towards packet technology, referred to as VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol).

But Larry Roberts, who headed the Air Force's Advance Research Projects Agency (ARPA), became interested in Baran's concepts and went on to develop the ARPANET in 1969, the forerunner of Internet. Some say Roberts is the father of the Internet but that's another story. Baran, in my opinion, deserves the title.