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Hank©[_2_]

On 4/2/2013 10:32 AM, wrote:
On Tue, 2 Apr 2013 07:27:17 -0400, BAR wrote:

In article , says...

You ****ing moron. Gore was one of the driving forces behind the
internet.

Ah, no! Gore was not one of the driving forces behind the Internet. Electronic Commerce was
the driving force behind the Internet's ascendency. The ability to reduce variable costs was
and inprove communications was the the driving force.

The biggest force was deregulating the phone company, home PCs and the
invention of the Hayes modem.
Without that the internet would still be a primitive Email system
between military people and a few universities with big government
(DARPA) contracts, running on mainframe computers.
If I had to point to one man who brought the internet to the people I
would say Steve Case who included an internet browser to AOL at a time
when nobody had even heard of it.
Prior to that "online" meant going to an in house service like
Compuserve, Prodigy, AOL or a privately run BBS.
There were over a million Prodigy users when Al Gore
"discovered" the internet in the late 80s. AOL wasn't even around yet.
The bill he sponsored in 91 did throw federal money at a network of
fiber backbones that loop the US but the telcos were going to build
that anyway. They just did it with tax money instead of private
capital. They had already started building it when the federal money
came in. It was an important kick start to the rise of a faster
internet but the internet was coming anyway.

I remember the Arpanet with the Cray water cooled super computers. I
know NOAA had one and there were a few others. There were nodes all over
the place. The one I was familiar with was centered around an Ampex
terabit memory system controlled and front ended by Nova 1200 and PDP
1105 and 1135s. Nowadays all of that power would fit in a PC case.