Quote:
Originally posted by AggieSigmaNu361
but,
i thought Al DID invent the internet?
jeez, haven't I been misled.
Kitso
KS 361 more dollars i'd spend on your ring than docet, beth, cuz i'm employed!
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Verbatim email from my Political Science professor:
Here's a more detailed answer to the question about what Al Gore did.
In the 1980s he was chairman of the Senate subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space. In this role, he is widely acknowledged to be one of the few American politicians who took the time to understand technology. He had been an enthusiastic supporter of the National Science Foundation's supercomputer centers, and in 1986 sponsored legislation asking the government to study the possibility of networking these centers with fiber optics. The report that came back was massively thick and involved many agencies. It advocated building more better faster bigger computers to facilitate advanced research and a national research and education computer network. Gore was distracted by the elections of 1988, but eventually held hearings and sponsored legislation to do more or less that. It took until 1991 for the computer part of the legislation to pass and 1993 for the network part of the legislation to be signed into law.
In 1994 Gore gave a speech about the 'Information Super Highway Summit' in which he was one of the first American politicians to publicly express appreciation that something important was happening with the development of the internet. You can read his remarks at:
http://artcontext.com/cal/97/superhig.txt.
The statement for which he has been ridiculed was made in a 1999 interview with Wolf Blitzer. He said:
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
You can read the transcript at:
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stori...anscript.gore/
For what it is worth, Vint Cerf, who has been called 'the father of the Internet' for his role in creating the TCP/IP protocol said: "I think it is very fair to say that the Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the vice president in his current role and in his earlier role as senator."
Enough.
Dr. McCormick