Musings

Bringing the Web to America

It has long been my conviction that anything appearing on the Wall Street Journal’s Editorial/Op-Ed pages is a lie. In fact, if there’s a paragraph appearing on those pages, in which you can’t spot an evident falsehood or obfuscation, then the problem is that you haven’t studied the topic, at hand, in sufficient depth.

On that note, it comes as no surprise that we “learn” [via Kevin Drum] that the Internet was the creation of private industry (specifically, Xerox PARC), not some nasty Government agency (DARPA). Nor is it surprising that the author of the book about PARC, on which the claims of the WSJ Op-Ed were based, promptly took to the pages of of the LA Times to debunk each and every paragraph. (See also Vint Cerf: “I would happily fertilize my tomatoes with Crovitz’ assertion.”)

Which leaves me little to do, but post a copy of this lecture, from 1999, by Paul Kunz of SLAC. The video quality is really bad, but this is (to my knowledge) the only extant copy. He tells a bit of the pre-history of the internet, and the role high energy physicists played.

As Michael Hiltzik alluded to, in his LA Times piece, AT&T (and, more relevant for Kunz’s story, the Europeen Telecoms) were dead-set against the internet, and did everything they could to smother it in its cradle. High energy physicists (who were, in turn, funded by …) played a surprising role in defeating them. (And yes, unsurprisingly, Al Gore makes a significant appearance towards the end.)

Enjoy ….

And now you know the answer to the trivia question: “What was the first website outside of Europe?”