[Air-L] 'MEN Invented the Internet'?

[Thomas Jones]

I agree - sort of.

Yes, the invention of the Internet involved many parties. But we must understand that the underlying infrastructure was mostly built by the US Army and AT&T (with latecomer Verizon). Tim Wu dives into this in his book "The Master Switch". 

The closest singular person I can think of who "invented" the Internet would be J. C. R. Licklider. And lets not confuse the Internet with the World Wide Web. The Internet isnt composed entirely of web servers - it is here that Universities contributed heavily with the Department of Defense.


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________________________________________
From: air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org [air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] on behalf of Jeremy hunsinger [jeremy at tmttlt.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2012 2:56 PM
To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
Subject: Re: [Air-L] 'MEN Invented the Internet'?

other than the gender bias issue... which i agree is just distasteful
and untrue.

the other real problem with the title is the term invented.

no one invented the internet.  a great number of people contributed to
early networking technologies, and eventually someone named a protocol
inter-networking protocol.  so at best we have someone who named one
operational parameter of the internet, but no one invented it, no one
as best as i can tell from my readings aimed for anything like it is
today until around 1996 when it became an object of commercial policy
and by then... it really was an assemblage of operating protocols and
networks that were quite old.  it isn't like ethernet, where we have a
possible inventor at all.  for instance, who can name the famous
actress who worked on on operational protocol for radio switching that
we now use in 801.11 radio based internets?  you all know her... she
didn't invent the internet, but she patented something very important
to today's internet.
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