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Originally Posted by fckm
Al Gore pushed through legislation which gave DARPA funding to create arpanet, the precuror to the internet. So without Al Gore, this thread wouldn't exist.
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Gore wasn't even around when "it" started ~68 as a project of ARPA. He & Bradley helped the funding process much later (80's) but things were rolling quite well. Check out all the pre-76 RFC's for a historical view before Gore's first election to office, pre-86 for before he helped NSFNet get funding.
What Gore did was roll out legislation to fund NSFNet. NSFNet was the public access project under the National Science Foundation giving wide access to DARPANet which had existed for years. (ARPA/DARPA - ...by any other name, but they've changed it 3 times) The Pentagon was cutting funds for the public project so schools and the few others who had become dependent on the Internet (coined ~74) would have had to do something creative. It was a noisy problem. Gore picked it up and ran. Good for him!
Some accounts tell it as an arranged marriage. A problem created and solved for mutual benefit. The Pentagon was tired of justifying funds for something that was not a direct benefit, so the pitch was gentle and right over the plate.
Who knows, maybe Jimmy Carter would have created Internet for Humanity, or maybe we'd all be using BITNET listservs.
