There might be something in this internet thingee

Has the feel of the late 80s. My first internet account was in college in 1987. You dialed up to a Vax machine and the killer aps were an e-mail client (Pine) and Usenet in a Shell account. I remember posting a question to a Usenet newsgroup and a guy from Canada e-mailing me with an answer and thinking it was the coolest thing. What's wild is that Google has everything ever posted to Usenet backed up if you click on the "Groups" tab. I can still find that original post to the Usnenet newsgroup. I showed it to my nephew and told him that it was me, not Al Gore, who invented the Internet.

 

It doesn't really matter. The perception is that he said it.

And even though he never said it, it was at a time when he was getting a rep for telling whoppers and what he did say was "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." The thing is, the Internet grew out of a bunch of different networks that had their genesis in disparate places--some defense department, some private university funded networks, etc. For example ARPANET--things that were in place well before he served in Congress. There wasn't any "initiative" in which a bunch of politicians sat down and said, "Let's create a global network." The thing grew organically, without much of a plan. It's why no matter what he did in Congress in the 70s, saying he took the initiative in creating the Internet sounded kind of ridiculous to anyone who was a pioneer in the early days of networking.

 

He didn't create the Internet either, nor did any initiative of his as a Congressman create it. It's a real stretch. The reason the "invented the Internet" thing got hung on him was how he came off in that interview. Parsing the language is meaningless. He already had a reputation of puffing himself up and then it sounded like he was taking credit for inventing fire.