The Penn Bain Way

If Mitt ran USA like Bain, he'd run up debt, charge USA huge "management fees", let it go bankrupt, sell it to China and Saudi Arabia, kick us out of our houses, and then sell our houses to the highest international bidders.

WSJ Internet Invention Spin-Job

On the July 23rd, 2012 print edition of the Wall Street Journal, page A11, L. Gordon Crovitz claims that the Internet is mostly the result of private research and investment, countering Obama's statement about its government roots. Typical of Murdoch products, it's full of half-truths, textual manipulation, and borders on outright lies.

The Internet is a combination of technologies developed over time, and private firms did indeed have a role in its evolution. But the majority of the Internet technology development was directly or indirectly related to government funding from the US and other governments around the world.

The most glaring fault of the article surrounds ARPANET, a military project. Crovitz quotes Robert Taylor, who was part of the ARPANET program of the 70's and 80's. "ARPANET was not an Internet. An Internet is a connection between two or more computers", Taylor allegedly stated. While technically true perhaps, it misses the point of ARPANET's role in history. ARPANET pioneered the use of "packet switching" to send data packets in partitioned chunks with routing and ID info in order to be "reassembled" on the receiving end.

This differed from the old way of having direct lines of communication for the bits. Chunk-ifying the data gives more flexibility to work around high-traffic and defective spots on a network. It's almost comparable to using trucks versus trains. While trains are good at high-volume transport between a few fixed points, they are not flexible if you have many different destinations. (Data terminals, which are a kind of remote computer monitor, were one early use of ARPANET.)

Whether or not this "is" the Internet is secondary to the fact that the Internet is heavily based on packet switching. Murdoch's, I mean Crovitz's complaint is almost like saying early rockets didn't matter in the history of rockets because they "never reached space". His reason for dismissing it is very weak. Packet switching is arguably the most important part of the Internet technologies. Ethernet (below) had decent alternatives, but packet switching was new and unique. It's not the standard that stands out, it's the technique itself.

The article correctly points out that Ethernet, another part of Internet technology, was developed at Xerox, the private copier corporation. However, it was inspired by ALOHAnet, which came from the public University of Hawaii. (It seems building time-travel devices to forge Hawaiian birth certificates takes cutting-edge technologies.)

Crovitz's other Xerox references relating to graphical interfaces and early PC's are mostly tangential to the Internet, but still misleading regardless. For example, he failed to credit university research on Ivan Sutherland's "light pen" based graphical user interface work, and Douglas Engelbart's invention of the mouse at Stanford. Stanford was also instrumental in testing and developing hypertext.

Much of early graphical interface research was motivated by military command and control centers, which wanted faster ways to visualize and select ("point to") various radar targets on the screen. The Air Force SAGE system is an early example.

Many of the World Wide Web protocols and language techniques were developed as part of CERN, The European Organization for Nuclear Research, a government organization.

Here is a copy of the very first web-page:

http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

The Internet and the World Wide Web are technically two different things, actually; but in practice most consider them closely related. Further, the Australian government under CSIRO developed some key parts of WiFi technology that we commonly use in our homes to allow multiple devices to connect to the internet.

Eventually the Internet was commercialized as Crovitz points out, but that's irrelevant to Obama's comments about its origin. If big business had it its way, the we'd still be using the slow, proprietary, and expensive network services such as Prodigy, CompuServe, and America Online that popped onto the scene around the early 1990's. They were much more profitable than the Internet because corporations controlled distribution and content and were happy to milk customers.

However, college kids playing around with the early Internet and Web services sponsored by universities realized the potential of a more open alternative capable of sharing info across different computer brands and networks.

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