The darkness of collective punishment.
Leftists are completely tone deaf to this kind of thing, but as I wrote earlier, I think those four words sealed his fate this fall.
10 thoughts on ““You Didn’t Build That””
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The darkness of collective punishment.
Leftists are completely tone deaf to this kind of thing, but as I wrote earlier, I think those four words sealed his fate this fall.
Comments are closed.
That article repeats a stupid recent meme which needs to be rebutted.
Saying that the US government did not create the Internet is hogwash and a disservice. Vannemar Bush was a presidential science advisor. DARPA funded the creation of the Internet and TCP/IP not to mention they funded the SRI’s Augmentation Research Center (ARC) managed by Douglas Engelbart where the computer mouse and the NLS were developed. Xerox improved the concepts developed at ARC to develop the Xerox Alto. The first two nodes in the Internet connected UCLA to SRI. The third node was at UCSB. The fourth node was at the University of Utah. You will probably notice none of these is at Xerox.
The Internet was later expanded, with NSF funding, to connect the disparate supercomputing sites in the US. Eventually access was opened up to commercial service providers and the general population.
The idiots which keep talking about Ethernet fail to realize that Ethernet is a LAN (local area network) protocol. The Internet and TCP/IP have run over a lot of different things which are not Ethernet based including X.25, ISDN, ATM, LTE. The TCP/IP protocol has been run over several different network transport mechanisms since it was developed. There is even an RFC for running TCP/IP using carrier pigeons.
The most widely used software application programming interface for TCP/IP is BSD Sockets which was appropriately developed at UC Berkeley for BSD Unix. The BSD Socket interface is used in Linux, BSD, Windows, MacOS X. You are most likely using it right now for reading this.
The WorldWideWeb hypertext interface was developed by Tim Berners Lee while he was working at CERN which is an international particle physics research center located in Switzerland. It was funded with public money.
Sorry revisionists but the Internet was not funded by commercial interests and was largely not made by commercial interests. Government funding and academia can create new technology.
So, just so I understand here, if you take government funding, it’s not your work anymore?
I’ve said this to a dozen of my friends in the NewSpace industry.. if you take NASA funding, you will forever be known as “a NASA spinoff”.
It seems you’re proving my point.
Did Bill Gates develop Windows? Did Eisenhower build the Interstate Highway System? No, but they directly funded them. It is great that people know the actual designers or builders but it is common to attribute things to people which invested the capital into it even if they were not the actual developers per se. Edison is an infamous example of it.
I rightly mock anyone who claims Bill Gates wrote DOS, let alone Windows. Please don’t advocate your sloppy revisionism as the gold standard.
Godzilla, the simple rebuttal is that it would have happened anyway. As Trent notes, just because the internet has the taint of public funding on it, doesn’t mean that public funding was necessary.
“Vannemar Bush was a presidential science advisor. ”
That would be Vannevar Bush.
I stand corrected.
@Godzilla: you guys are using the word “Internet” to mean two different things.
First, my credentials: when I was at ATT/Bell Labs from 1980 to 1990, among other things, I did a fair bit of Unix sysadmining. Starting with a Usenet node in 1981, to running the first actual Ethernet (co-ax Thick-net, no less) at Red Hill in 1987. After that I worked in Solomon Brothers (where I helped build and deploy their internal Network Management system). I got the first Internet connection into a Verizon location in 1992. So I was pretty much there when the Internet was born. I didn’t develop any of the technology, but I was at the very bleeding edge of its deployment and commercialization.
And this is where I think the crux of the problem is:
– There’s a bunch of people that refer to the basic core technologies of the Net, such as the protocol stack (mostly, but not exclusively IP-based: TCP, UDP, etc), as being developed by ARPA and others on the US Government dime. This is largley correct – I was there as early as 1978 at UIUC as an enthusiastic observer, early adopter and proponent. Most of the key people and projects in the early years (1980’s: pre UUNET and PSI) were either directly funded by ARPA or by other organizations (such as Berkeley, MIT, CMU, and a number of larger companies) that also received substantial government grants and contracts in the relevant fields.
– There’s another group that refers to the actual physical infrastructure of the Net – data links (such as fiber cables, microwave links, satellite connections,e tc), data centers, routers, and servers – when they speak of the Internet being built by private capital. This is completely correct. I was there when it was being built. I did a fair bit of it myself – running cable, setting up networks, building data centers, running an ISP and hosting company. If you think the overwhelmingly large proportion of the actual network was or is today built on a Government dime, you have no idea what you’re talking about.
So for anyone arguing either side, please be kind and disambiguate:
– If you’re talking about the core protocols and some early versions of the hardware then please call it “Initial Internet Technology”
– If you’re talking about the actual physical Internet of today please call it “Today’s Internet”
Edison is not around to manufacture light bulbs either. Even if you attribute the invention to someone else they are certainly neither Philips nor OSRAM.
The fundamental work done to develop the suite of Internet protocols and other technologies used today was done with public money. It was certainly not privately funded. Most of the actual work was either done at universities or research institutes and contractors closely associated with universities like BBN which has close ties to MIT.
Bob Metcalfe developed Ethernet based on the ALOHA system developed at the University of Hawaii. From there came the basic concepts used to develop CDMA as used in Ethernet. Had Ethernet failed we could have been using a successor of a proprietary LAN technology like DECnet instead of an open standard.
The current Internet as we know it is substantially different in size and the technology evolved afterwards. The commercial sector took the technology and improved upon it sure. It still would not have happened without the initial government investment. The commercial sector had the same time to create their own version of the Internet and the best they could come up with was Compuserve, AOL, GEnie and other similar pieces of closed and ridiculously expensive network crap.
…he’s a Leftist idiot.