From: News and Views | Opinion | Friday, May 05, 2000
Gore Invented Internet?
Hey, He's Got a Case
WASHINGTON
 iffed
at the latest attack on him from Vice President Gore, George W. Bush accuses the vice
president of stretching the truth.
"He's the man who said he invented the Internet," Bush gibed, echoing a
common joke at Gore's expense.
Now let's kill the joke.
A) Gore did not claim to have invented the Internet. In an interview with Wolf Blitzer
in March 1999, Gore said: "During my service in the U.S. Congress, I took the
initiative in creating the Internet."
B) This claim is perfectly true. In March 1986, when computers were still something
found mostly in laboratories, Gore sponsored the Supercomputer Network Study Act to link
the nation's supercomputers into a single system.
This was his vision: "Libraries, rural schools, minority institutions and
vocational education programs will have access to the same national resources
databases, supercomputers, accelerators as more affluent and better-known
institutions."
Three years later, after noticing that France was making strides with its Minitel
home-computer network, Gore introduced the National High Performance Computer Technology
Act. One of its aims was to "establish a high-capacity national research and
education computer network."
His bill directed that the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which
had created the forerunner of the Internet, "shall ensure that unclassified computer
technology research is readily available to American industry."
In testimony to a House committee, Gore said: "I genuinely believe that the
creation of this nationwide network ... will create an environment where work stations are
common in homes and even small businesses."
At the time, even computer professionals were jeering at the notion of personal
computers. They would be a waste of money, costly machines for balancing checkbooks or
storing recipes. Gore saw them as terminals in a future national network of knowledge.
One of Gore's Republican colleagues, Sen. Slade Gorton of Washington, credited him at
the time for introducing a bill that would "create [note that word] a high-capacity
national research and education network to link up supercomputers and databases around the
country."
In 1991, Gore reintroduced his bill to provide funding for development of a national
computer network. He said: "Today, most students using computer networks are studying
science and engineering, but there are more and more applications in other fields, too.
Economists, historians and literature majors are all discovering the power of networking.
In the future, I think we will see computers and networks used to teach every subject from
kindergarten through grade school."
Gore found a supporter: President George Bush, father of George W. He signed Gore's
bill on Dec. 9, 1991, predicting that this new technology "offers the potential to
transform radically the way in which all Americans will work, learn and communicate in the
future. It holds the promise of changing society as much as the other great inventions of
the 20th century, including the telephone, air travel, radio and TV."
Does this documented record justify Gore's claim that during his service in Congress he
took the initiative in creating the Internet as we know it today? Seems to me, he has a
pretty good case.
But don't expect Bush, who urges Gore to "stick to the facts," to drop his
sneer. He knows that a lie is a powerful political weapon that can survive forever. His
own father never managed to kill the myth that he had no idea what a supermarket checkout
computer was.
By the way, when he signed Gore's Internet bill, President Bush took credit for it
himself. He said he had proposed it in his 1992 budget.


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