Amazing history lesson from Rush Limbaugh:
Robert Taylor, who ran the ARPA program in the 1960s, sent an email 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.'”
So, Crovitz writes, “If the government didn’t invent the Internet, who did? Vinton Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol, the Internet’s backbone, and Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for hyperlinks. (…)
When we were building this program back in the late eighties and early nineties, I was using CompuServe, and I’m 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’ll get to that in a second.) CompuServe was an aggregator. CompuServe is where you’d get the AP wire and the UPI wire and newspapers. I remember starting in 1986 with my Apple IIc, using the ProDOS system.
I was using it for show prep.
That’s when I began the process of not using newspapers. (…)
So my point is: Here you had CompuServe, which was what everybody uses the Internet for today. CompuServe was it, which begat AOL. CompuServe was very, very liberal. If I’m not mistaken, the guy who founded Free Republic got banned from issuing comments at various forums on CompuServe. (…)
