The answer is obvious GOD 
The trivial part of the internet is the underlying protocol and the HTTP specification. There are zillions of similar protocols and page description languages that didn’t become ‘the internet’.
‘The Internet’ is was not really designed and created by anyone. It’s an example of spontaneous order, like an ecosystem. Tim Berners-Lee had no idea that the HTTP transport would be used to create a worldwide auction house, or to make the world’s largest book store, or for any of the other millions of applications it’s been used for. Saying that DARPA and Berners-Lee and other pioneers ‘invented’ the internet is kind of like saying that the person who discovered asphalt invented Formula 1 racing, because the races run on asphalt.
The internet didn’t become what it is today until it was opened up commercially and the forces of the market took over. Until then, the internet was a relatively small place full of bad static web pages put together by academics and amateurs, along with IRC chat and Usenet Newsgroups and a few other dedicated uses. In fact, a lot of the people who created the first protocols and web sites were dead set against the commercialization of the internet, thinking it would be a destructive force that would result in chaos and bandwidth bottlenecks. They wanted to keep it for themselves.
The fact is, the internet is the result of an essentially free market and the spontaneous order that was generated by the interactions of millions of people. There is no central authority dictating the direction of the internet, other than at the lowest levels ensuring domain registration and such. But no one is deciding what web sites should be built and what the internet should be used for.
In that sense, we all created the internet.
This thread is as good a place as any to ask a question I’ve been mulling for a while now: What was it that led to CERN to “invent” (improve, whatever) the WWW protocol in the first place? I’m guessing it was to facilitate rapid dissemination of papers with links to citations. I know back in the day, a lot of academics were using Usenet to have discussions within their disciplines and the Web would be a big improvement on that. Were the powers that be at CERN able to foresee just how big an improvement it would be to spend research money – always in short supply – on getting it?
Tedious nitpick: Knights are referred to as Sir Firstname or Sir Firstname Lastname, never as Sir Lastname.
This thread is making me very nostalgic for Archie and Gopher.
I have nothing to add to the discussion, but when I first saw this, at first glance, I thought he was referring to Victoria Vetri, not Vittoria Vetra. I thought to myself, ‘Wow! She was smarter than I thought!’
And Veronica and Betty were hot!
It’s making me nostalgic for the old Western Union teletype networks ------- did a lot of buying and selling and chatting with folks on that back in the late 60s or so.
For the umpteenth time:
Al Gore said that he “took the initiative in creating the internet.” It was a very ham-handed and foolish attempt to inflate his (rather peripheral) involvement with the internet. If people misunderstood him, he has only himself to blame.
And for the umpeenth time, his essential statement was neither incorrect nor unjustified according to Cerf and Kahn:
“We have met the Internet … and it is us!” 
This is another reason why it’s foolish to point to any particular group as being the ‘inventors’ of the internet. The basic idea of a ‘web’ of linked documents goes back a long time. In 1945, Vannevar Bush proposed a vast web of interlinked documents, which he called the Memex. Computers weren’t advanced enough at this time for him to foresee all this data being stored digitally, so he had in mind a vast file of very small microfilms, along with an associative index allowing the rapid lookup and delivery of an of the microfilms, and with associative links between them so you could read one microfilm and follow its links to other related films.
That’s remarkably like the basic conceptual structure of the world wide web.
The word ‘Hypertext’ was coined by Ted Nelson in 1965, 26 years before the first HTML page went online. Bill Atkinson made hypercard for the Mac five years before the first web page went online.
The internet was the result of a long series of engineering decisions that continued until we had the right collection of tools available to take the concept of hyperlinking and networking and put them together. It couldn’t have happened five years sooner, because computing power was still too expensive. It was inevitable that it would have arisen in some form or another within a few years after all the pieces of the puzzle were technically feasible.
An anlogy is the airplane. The Wright Brothers didn’t invent the airplane. They didn’t even invent the powered airplane. People knew how to build powered airplanes - they just didn’t have engines light enough for the task. It took a confluence of the evolution of a number of engineering disciplines to create the pieces needed to make a flying machine, and once those pieces were available, powered flight was inevitable. Had the Wright Brothers not existed, someone would have made the first powered flight within a year or two of the Wright Brothers anyway.
Tim Berners-Lee came up with the specific protocol used for the early internet, but it didn’t have to be that one. It’wasn’t an engineering breakthrough or great invention. Any number of different protocols could have been created to achieve the same thing. He just got there first. Once the demand for such a thing was created by the availability of the other pieces of the puzzle, it was inevitable that someone would have made something that worked.
If you want to look at who really ‘created’ the internet, it was the people who decided to allow it to become commercial and open, and to keep government far away from it. The internet became a frontier where homesteading was cheap and easy, and the rules were loose and people were free to try anything. That’s what caused it to explode in popularity and usefulness.
It could have gone another way. France tried to make an ‘internet’ that was centrally controlled by the government - the Minitel system. They subsidized it heavily, giving free terminals to citizens to attempt to reach critical masses and all the rest. It failed miserably, because no central planning authority can hope to have the kind of innovative power as the collective minds of hundreds of millions of people and a marketplace that rewards winners and punishes losers.
You can imagine scenarios where the internet would have been tightly controlled, with web pages having to undergo government certifications for acceptable content, accessibility requirements, yada yada. There could have been licensure of HTML coders, tax reporting and collecting requirements for every state for every internet transaction, government-controlled bandwidth allocation, censorship, you name it. If the Internet had the kind of regulatory burden dumped on it that the brick and mortar world has, we wouldn’t have anything like the advanced, diverse network we have today.
English is not my first language, but when someone says:
“During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”
I take to mean that the person is claiming to have been among the first to create the Internet. I don’t think his wording was clumsy, I think he said exactly what he wanted to say, and any subsequent explanation is simply backpedaling.
You guessed on the psychology of it correctly.
As another analogy, we can think of the USA zipcode system as another “protocol” layed on top of an infrastructure of roads, highways, ferries, etc for transporting (snail) mail. We wanted to make it easier to sort and route where envelopes would go. The human motivation to create a 5-digit zipcode protocol in 1960s is similar to creating HTTP protocol in 1990s.
We certainly didn’t have to create a 5-digit zipcode. Instead of encoding destinations in a 5-digit scheme, we could have used geo coordinates latitude longitude (Chicago, IL 41’ 87’) or something else.
The zipcode “protocol” turned out to be useful enough that UPS, FedEx, pizza delivery services, and advertisers studying demographics all use zipcodes even though they could have re-invented their own coding scheme.
Where the hell did you get that idea?. The Wrights’ 1903 engine was low-powered crap. They just didn’t want to buy a decent one off the shelf. What they did was understand the physics and engineering behind *controlled *flight, including having the breakthrough insight that a propeller is just a rotating wing and has the same physics behind it.
You’re right in that they made their breakthroughs when the time was ripe for them to be made and using the contributions of a number of others who hadn’t gotten there yet, but you’re absolutely wrong in trying to deny them credit for doing so. They did invent controlled, powered flight, just as each Internet inventor did come up with his own inventions.
Ahem. Look up ARPANET.
And it came first. Socialist France was online long before Free-Market America.
Or because it was popularized and therefore standardized prematurely, with immature standardization (text-only being the biggest limitation, but not one that kept it from being used for porn, naturally). That’s a common problem with any developing technology, regardless of who does the standardizing.
HTML, not HTTP.
But people didn’t misunderstand him. The words were plucked by his political foes (Drudge Report, IIRC) from an interview that few people heard and spun in a deliberate attempt to make him appear dishonest.
It’s a classic example of how a lie can make it around the world while the truth is still getting its shoes tied.
Was he ever allowed to elaborate on what his role “in creating” the internet actually was? No, beacuse setting the record straight is no fun compared to, “nyah-nyah! Al Gore lied and said he invented the internet! Al Gore is a liiiiiiiaaarrrr!”
Imagine how differently history would have turned out if only the American people weren’t so stupid as to not know what a key role Al Gore played “in creating” the internet.
Quoth Sam Stone:
HTTP is not part of the Internet. HTTP is a part of the WWW, but the Internet existed for over a decade before HTTP.
As for the deregulation that you say was the real critical element in making the Internet what it is today, a lot of that was in fact Al Gore’s work. So should we put you down as one of the ones accepting that Al Gore created the Internet?
In 1984 when McGill joined Bitnet, this was mainly used for email. The address protocol was similar to that of current email addresses and must have required a name server as we do today (although then as now, you could give an address in form xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, where each xxx is a number between 0 and 255). Then there was uunet (Unix to Unix net) in which you sent mail by giving a list of intermediate computers until you came to one on the list that was widely known and then you could stop. There may have been other nets, but I was unaware of them. Then gopher came along that allowed you to go out for a file that was public somehow (I cannot believe how much of this I have forgotten) and then archie (a MSc project for a McGill student in CS) came along in the late 80s to index these files. I think the “Internet” actually refers to the a network of these networks that allowed them to talk to each other. Then finally WWW and apache made it all more transparent and led to better indexers, yahoo, and eventually google (not to mention Cuil, Bing, and others).
Although off the topic, I once read an interesting book called, “The Victorian Internet” that detailed the growth of the telegraph starting around 1840. The history does read a lot like the history of the net. Interestingly, France had a large infrastructure of hilltop semaphhores and resisted the use of Telegraphy for a number of years after it had spread like wild in the US, England and most of Europe.
I respect Sam Stone and IIRC, he has aviation experience, but I agree with you completely. The Wright Brothers had to fight hard to get credit for the invention of controlled, powered flight. They rightfully got it eventually and everyone knows about them now but, what most people don’t know, is just how talented they really were as scientist/inventors. Even after they invented Flyer I and flew it in 1903, they kept things mostly a secret so much that the blowhards in the aviation innovation community barely even knew they existed.
As late as 1906, there were lots of people in the field that didn’t realize that controlled flight had already been accomplished and the Wright Brothers were several generations into their planes by that point. They finally were forced into an exhibition were they very much literally flew rings around their competition. They were so advanced for the time that it destroyed the competition.
Somebody would have invented effective controlled flight eventually but that era was similar to today in internet terms where 18 months let alone 3 years might as well be a lifetime and they blew everyone else away. I have been an aviation buff all my life but I read a book on them a few years ago and I was impressed to say the least. People that beat everyone else by that much whether it is the web or aviation deserve the credit they get.