The Theory of Nothing

Did Al Gore invent the Internet?

Did Al Gore invent the Internet?

Before we answer that question, we must go back and consider some history, and there’s no better place to start than with the origin of computers.

The modern computer was the brainchild of Alan Turing, a brilliant computer scientist who came up with the idea of digital processing of data. One of the first machines based on his idea was the one that the British used in World War II to break the German Enigma code that was used to send orders out to U-boats. These first computers used vacuum tubes, or Valves as the British called them, to represent digital numbers. This machine was incredibly slow by today’s standards and required a lot of maintenance. However, it did the job to win the war.

Computer technology took off when the transistor was invented in 1947 at Bell Labs, and it really became affordable when the integrated circuit was invented. By the late 70’s the first personal computers, albeit crude contraptions, were introduced. Think of the Apple I created by Jobs and Wozniak. The IBM personal computer was introduced in 1981 and soon spawned many imitators. I might add here that IBM didn’t think that the personal computer would be popular. How wrong they were.

The Internet made its appearance before personal computers. In fact, it appeared before Al Gore had anything to do with it. In the 1960’s the United States Department of Defense authorized the development of a packet network system so that information could be easily transferred among Defense contractors and educational institutes that were doing military research. The schools got into it in a big way in 1981 when the National Science Foundation created the Computer Science Network.

Let me be clear about this; the Internet back then was not what we have now. It was purely text oriented. No pictures or video could be displayed. Photos and documents could be transferred by a TCP protocol, but one had to have a DOD account or a university account to use this Internet. Let’s just say that the Internet was boring back then.

What we have now is the Wide World Web, better known as the Web. This protocol uses hypertext or HTTP, a page of information processing technique that can imbed images and videos. That began to appear in the 80’s but it wasn’t until the 90’s that it became widespread because in order to see pictures on a computer one required a graphic processor system and an Extended Video Graphics Adapter (EVGA - now NVida) monitor. One also needed a browser. All of this may sound stupid, but there were no such things back before the 90’s, at least not available, or affordable, to the public.

One of the first popular browsers was Mosaic, which appeared in 1993. I’ll bet not too many people remember that one. The other problem with the Web back then was access. Before the Internet was widely available, there were local area networks like CompuServe and later, AOL. They featured user groups where one could post comments in what was known as threads, all of which were text based. These local networks began to offer Internet Web access via dialup. This meant using a slow modem, which at that time was no faster than 300 baud. Eventually, the speed was increased to 64K baud, but that was still excruciatingly slow by todays DSL or Cable service standards. Believe me when I say that this was the ‘dark ages’ of computing.

Supposedly, Al Gore had something to do with spurring research in computer science when he was the Vice President. Okay, I get that, but he definitely didn’t invent the Internet. So, when you use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Wattpad, just remember where it all came from.

Thanks for reading.