http://www.cluebot.com/article.pl?sid=00/09/29/0711253&mode=thread Did Al Gore Really Invent the Internet? posted by cicero on Friday September 29, @02:11AM from the resuscitating-al-gore's-image dept. As the election nears, Net-pioneers Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn are busy defending Al Gore. The veep's invented-here crack about creating the Internet, they claim in their article attached below, has been terribly misunderstood. Now, we're fans of the TCP/IP-inventing duo, but it's been a long time in political ecology since Cerf famously joked 15 years ago in parody RFC968 that: "Twas the night before start-up and all through the net, not a packet was moving; no bit nor octet..." Things are more complicated now, and MCI's Cerf has morphed from an IETF geek into a Washington powerbroker and Friend of Bill and Al. Cerf showed up at the New Year's Eve White House millennium gala, spoke at an October 1999 White House "Millennium Evening" lecture, and appeared with the president and vice president at a July 1997 event to introduce administration policy proposals. We note that other prominent figures recently have made similar attempts to rescue Gore's tattered image among techies. But a more neutral description of the vice president's role in history is, we think, a fine 1999 article by author Virginia Postrel. Their article: http://www.cluebot.com/article.pl?sid=00/09/29/0711253&mode=thread