Columnist L. Gordon Crovitz suggests that the idea of the government launching the Internet is an urban legend.
“The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communications lines up even in a nuclear strike,” he writes in the Wall Street Journal. “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.”
“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,” wrote Robert Taylor via email in 2004 (Taylor ran the ARPA program in the 1960s).
While Vint Cerf developed TCP/IP, the Internet’s protocol, and Tim Berners-Lee gets the credit for hyperlinks, Taylor says it was Xerox PARC that created the Ethernet — the precursor to the Internet.
Ethernet, which allowed the links between different networks, was the technological breakthrough that not only allowed Xerox to link computers to share copiers, but later formed the basis for the Internet.
“Then, in 1979, Steve Jobs negotiated an agreement whereby Xerox’s venture-capital division invested $1 million in Apple, with the requirement that Jobs get a full briefing on all the Xerox PARC innovations,” explains the article. “‘They just had no idea what they had,’ Jobs later said, after launching hugely profitable Apple computers using concepts developed by Xerox.”
“It’s important to understand the history of the Internet because it’s too often wrongly cited to justify big government,” concludes Crovitz. “It’s also important to recognize that building great technology businesses requires both innovation and the skills to bring innovations to market. As the contrast between Xerox and Apple shows, few business leaders succeed in this challenge. Those who do — not the government — deserve the credit for making it happen.”
Columnist L. Gordon Crovitz suggests that the idea of the government launching the Internet is an urban legend.
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