Crovitz, Gordon. "Gordon Crovitz: Who Really Invented the Internet." The Wall Street Journal, July 22, 2012.
From the article: "It's an urban legend that the
government launched the Internet. The myth is that the Pentagon created the
Internet to keep its communications lines up even in a nuclear strike. 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. In a 1946
article in The Atlantic titled "As We May Think," Bush defined an
ambitious peacetime goal for technologists: Build what he called a
"memex" 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."
That fired imaginations, and by the 1960s
technologists were trying to connect separate physical communications networks
into one global network—a "world-wide web." The federal government
was involved, modestly, via the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency
Network." Read more
See also
McMillan, Robert. "Xerox: Uh, We Didn’t Invent the Internet." Wired, July 23, 2012.Hiltzik, Michael. "So, who really did invent the Internet?" Los Angeles Times, July 23, 2012.
