{"id":15064,"date":"2012-07-24T17:09:10","date_gmt":"2012-07-24T17:09:10","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2012-07-24T17:09:10","modified_gmt":"2012-07-24T17:09:10","slug":"big_government_didn_t_build_the_internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/admin.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2012\/07\/24\/big_government_didn_t_build_the_internet\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Government Didn\u2019t Build the Internet!"},"content":{"rendered":"

RUSH: Now, let\u2019s move on to this Internet business. And the reason that I want to spend just a little time on this before we get to your phone calls is Obama\u2019s not the first, he\u2019s simply the latest, in a long line of people to cite the Internet as a justification for big government. It\u2019s interesting that the Internet is one of the only things they cite. Of course, Obama\u2019s now talking about roads and bridges.<\/a> Do you know, by the way, that we have twice as many miles of road as the ChiComs do? <\/p>\n

And yet theirs is the economy that\u2019s burgeoning and ours isn\u2019t. <\/p>\n

We got twice the number of roads, and we probably have more bridges than they do. That\u2019s exactly right. With that huge landmass that the ChiComs have, we have twice as many roads, twice the mileage. I don\u2019t know what the figures are on bridges, but it\u2019s probably commensurate. So you have Obama. He\u2019s just the latest to cite the Internet as evidence big government is solely responsible for the success of many (whispers) corporations — corporations, where people work. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It\u2019s about all they can cite, so they glom onto it. And it\u2019s important here. The Wall Street Journal spells it out: “It\u00c2\u2019s also important to recognize that building great technology businesses requires both innovation and the skills to bring innovations to market.” And they use, in this story, a contrast between Xerox and Apple. Now, let\u2019s just get straight to it. The author of this piece is Gordon Crovitz, and it\u2019s entitled, “Who Really Invented the Internet?” <\/p>\n

Quote: “A telling moment in the presidential race came recently when Barack Obama said: ‘If you\u2019ve got a business, you didn\u2019t build that. Somebody else made that happen.\u2019 He justified elevating bureaucrats over entrepreneurs by referring to bridges and roads, adding: ‘The Internet didn\u2019t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all companies could make money off the Internet.'” Crovitz writes, “It\u2019s an urban legend that the government launched the Internet.<\/p>\n

“The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communications lines up even in a nuclear strike.” Crovitz writes, “The truth is a more interesting story about how innovation happens — and about how hard it is to build successful technology companies even once the government gets out of the way. For many technologists, the idea of the Internet traces to Vannevar Bush, the presidential science adviser during World War II who oversaw the development of radar and the Manhattan Project.<\/p>\n

“In a 1946 article in The Atlantic titled ‘As We May Think,\u2019 Bush defined an ambitious peacetime goal for technologists: Build what he called a ‘memex\u2019 through which ‘wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.'” Even if you don\u2019t know what that means, what it did in the scientific technology community is: “That fired imaginations, and by the 1960s technologists were trying to connect separate physical communications networks into one global network — a ‘world-wide web.\u2019<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

“The federal government was involved, modestly, via the Pentagon\u2019s Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Its goal was not maintaining communications during a nuclear attack, and it didn\u2019t build the Internet. Robert Taylor, who ran the ARPA program in the 1960s, sent an e-mail to fellow technologists in 2004 setting the record straight: ‘The creation of the Arpanet was not motivated by considerations of war. The Arpanet was not an Internet. An Internet is a connection between two or more computer networks.'” <\/p>\n

So, Crovitz writes, “If the government didn\u2019t invent the Internet, who did? Vinton Cerf developed the TCP\/IP protocol, the Internet\u2019s backbone, and Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for hyperlinks.” Do you know what TCP\/IP is? What? How would you explain TCP\/IP to somebody? Somebody in Rio Linda. (interruption) It\u2019s like the phone number of a computer network. It\u2019s like the phone number of a computer. Okay, TCP\/IP. And hyperlinks, it\u2019s obvious. That\u2019s the link in a story that you click to take you to some other site. Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for creating the hyperlink.<\/p>\n

“According to a book about Xerox PARC, ‘Dealers of Lightning\u2019 (by Michael Hiltzik), its top researchers realized they couldn\u2019t wait for the government to connect different networks, so would have to do it themselves.” I mean, the government did create this labyrinth, but they didn\u2019t know what to do with it. At no time were they even pondering commercial applications for this, which is the point. Ah, you can debate — and people are gonna debate this \u2019til the end of time — whether it was a network communications system for nuclear attack; whether it was this or whether it was that. <\/p>\n

The point that Crovitz is making here is that whatever it was and why it ever was invented, it was never intended by the government for commercial application. And had it been left to the government and had it remained the sole property of the government, it wouldn\u2019t exist today. That\u2019s all you really need to know about this. And yet Obama is running around claiming credit for it, as Algore did, and making it one of the reasons businesses — (whispers) “corporations” — are successful. <\/p>\n

So back to Xerox PARC. “[T]op researchers realized they couldn\u2019t wait for the government to connect different networks, so would have to do it themselves. ‘We have a more immediate problem than they do,\u2019 Robert Metcalfe told his colleague John Shoch in 1973. ‘We have more networks than they do.\u2019 Mr. Shoch later recalled that ARPA staffers ‘were working under government funding and university contracts. They had contract administrators … and all that slow, lugubrious behavior to contend with.'” <\/p>\n

Quote: “But full credit goes to the company where Mr. Taylor worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox. It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks. Researchers there also developed the first personal computer (the Xerox Alto) and the graphical user interface that still drives computer usage today.” Xerox did all that. They sat on it. They didn\u2019t know what they had \u2019til Steve Jobs came along and saw it. Now, one other thing about this. <\/p>\n

<\/a>When we were building this program back in the late eighties and early nineties, I was using CompuServe, and I\u2019m gonna lay claim to this: I was one of the first major media figures to start using CompuServe, which was the competitor to AOL at the time. There was no Internet. (Well, there was, but I\u2019ll get to that in a second.) CompuServe was an aggregator. CompuServe is where you\u2019d get the AP wire and the UPI wire and newspapers. I remember starting in 1986 with my Apple IIc, using the ProDOS system. <\/p>\n

I was using it for show prep. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s when I began the process of not using newspapers.<\/p>\n