Byte Me by Marv Dealy
The Internet Al Gore didn’t Invent is 40 years Old
Despite references that continue to this day, Al Gore never claimed he invented the Internet.
When he was running for the Democratic presidential nomination in early 1999, he did make a statement during an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on the “Late Edition” program that has been taken out of context, although it certainly was self-serving and inelegantly stated.
What Gore actually said was that “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important…” (see, Snopes.com, tinyurl.com/7l7b8)
The real invention of the Internet, which has grown into a network of networks serving billions of people around the world with the standardized Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP), dates back to the launch of Sputnik by the U.S.S.R., which led the United States to create the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in February, 1958. The first two nodes of what would become the ARPANET were interconnected between SRI International in Menlo Park and the UCLA School of Engineering and Applied Science forty years ago last week, on October 29, 1969, thirty years before Gore’s appearance on T.V. with Wolf Blitzer.
Much work followed, and five years later the first use of the term “internet” occurred with the publication of the “first full specification of TCP that was written by Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine, then at Stanford University,” according to an article at Wikipedia.org (tinyurl.com/6wvgo).
The article goes on to say that “The first TCP/IP-based wide-area network was operational by January 1, 1983. The opening of the network to commercial interests began in 1988.”
Looking back on Al Gore’s service in Washington, we see that he was in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1977-1985, and in the U.S. Senate from 1985-93, but note again that the first use of the term Internet was three years before he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. The use of the term Internet didn’t become, well, world wide until 1996, three years after Gore left the U.S. Senate.
The first really popular web browser, the NCSA Mosaic web browser, was introduced in 1993, the year Gore left the U.S. Senate. What are we to make of these inconvenient truths? That Gore is a politician who makes self-serving statements? Anyone else have an idea? Just remember, he didn’t actually ever say that he invented the Internet, just that he “took the initiative in creating the Internet.”
Non Roman character domain names created: After much discussion, the people that oversee international web addresses and decide what domains can and can’t be created have approved international domain names containing characters other than what we’d call the alphabet and the numbers 0-9.
According to an article at Informationweek.com by Antone Gonsalves, “The purpose of the change is to help bring online the billions of people around the world who never use Roman characters in their daily lives. Where Web addresses today can only use the letters A-Z and digits 0-9, they will evolve over the coming years to also include many of the 100,000 characters of the languages of the world.” (tinyurl.com/yaohwyf)
Gonsalves continues “Initially, however, the change will only apply to country-code top level domains controlled by national governments. Such Web addresses have endings such as .cn, .uk or .us, which stand for China, United Kingdom and the United States, respectively. Such ccTLDs cover about 40% of Web sites. The rest have endings such as .com, .net and .org, which are obtained commercially. Internationalization of the latter TLDs is expected to occur in the coming years.”
Paul Suarez took a good look at the pros and cons of the approval of non-Roman character domains for PCWorld.com (tinyurl.com/yjptajt) that are worth looking at as we move away from the traditional ASCII based Web, developed all those years ago by white guys for use by other white guys who thought the QWERTY keyboard was the ultimate input device for a computer.
Suarez writes “Pro: World Wide Web Supporting World Wide Language. Let’s face it; millions of Internet users speak languages that aren’t written using Roman characters. Allowing Web sites to have domains that use other characters will make Web addresses more recognizable to some and make the Web more accessible to millions of new users.
“Con: Keyboards and Restrictive Access. Adding support for 100,000 international characters would make traditional keyboards insufficient input devices for accessing the entire Internet. As fellow PC World writer Jacqueline Emigh pointed out, it would be next to impossible to produce a keyboard that could support characters from every language under the sun. Virtual keyboards and language packs could possibly help alleviate the problem for some people, but there wouldn’t be an easy fix.”
Suarez points out that new country codes being only the beginning are both a plus and a minus, saying “If ICANN decides to open generic domains without extending rights to existing URL holders, international companies and brands might find themselves purchasing URLs in multiple languages to protect the use of their name.
“If done properly, opening generic domains to international characters could be a good thing. If International corporations were granted rights to the .com URLs they already possess it could spell an end to selecting a region before entering the site. For instance, going to intel.com could lead to the English version of the site, while using a Japanese, Russian, or Korean suffix would take you to a version of the site with that language. It would also open doors for smaller Web sites that are just interested in serving a particular language group.”
There’s more in Suarez’s article to ponder, but my head hurts, and I want to go use Al Gore’s invention to find a solution to my headache.
Email questions to Marv at: marv.dealy@throck.com.
Marv Dealy founded Throckmorten Enterprises in San Francisco in 1988 and moved the company to Big Oak Flat in 1996. Open Monday through Friday, 9-ish to 5-ish (209 962-7308). The company provides technical support for a large Silicon Valley company’s webinars, as well as providing professional website design, and computer and network maintenance. The company also publishes the Yosemite Gazette.
