by Joseph Whalen

Created on: February 13, 2008

The conceptual idea for the internet sprouted one fateful day in October of 1957. When amateur radio operators tuned their state of the art ham radios to 20.005 and 40.002 MHz to listen to the beeps of a little basketball sized object orbiting the planet. When the Soviet Union placed Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite into orbit and demonstrated their superior rocket technology, the United States government understood just how vulnerable it was.

Almost immediately after the shiny little satellite broadcast its first signals the United States was already planning the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency or ARPA. The purpose of this agency was to ensure the technology of the United States military was kept ahead of that of the Soviet Union. Their efforts yielded what has become recognized as the predecessor of the Internet, ARPANET. This was the first packet switched network, the principle technology the Internet is based on today.

The fundamental concepts and technology for the Internet were developed during the 1960's and 1970's as part of the ARPA and eventually DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency). Scientists and innovators such as J.C.R. Licklider, Lawrence Roberts and Paul Baran were the fathers of the technology that became today's Internet. As the network began to grow new innovators such as Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn, Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine, co-creators of the TCP protocols that even now govern the Internet added their contributions. When the network opened up to commercial interests starting in 1989 new innovations were introduced by still more famous contributors such as Tim Berners-Lee with the creation of the World Wide Web Project.

It is the likes of the great minds mentioned here that we think of when we think of the creators of the Internet. There is no one creator of the Internet; instead it is a conglomeration of contributors, scientists and inventors who gave us what we now know as the Internet. As far as Al Gore's "contributions" to the Internet, they pale in comparison to the giants who we recognize as the true creators of the Internet. While Al Gore's political sponsorship of projects related to the growth of the internet are well documented, that hardly qualifies him to take any more credit for the Internet than a graduate student at UCLA working under Licklider during the early ARPANET days. Did they both contribute to the effort? Certainly, one can hardly deny that. Were their contributions vital to the creation of the Internet? Given the gravity of the two and their limited contributions it's not likely either the graduate student or Gore could be credited as a major contributor to the Internet.

While it is largely true that the statements that tie Al Gore to the creation of the internet were at best misquoted, to continue the faade that he had more than a tertiary contribution is an insult to those who were the true creators of the Internet. While these claims make for interesting press packets and fodder on the lecture circuit, beyond these mediums it holds little water. Al Gore simply did not contribute anything approaching significance to the creation of the Internet.

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