Who invented the internet?
Wall Street Journal columnist L. Gordon Crovitz took a stab at this question on Monday and settled on Xerox -- the copier company whose research and development group, Xerox PARC, invented just about everything people like about the personal computer.
The columnist took exception to Barack Obama's recent claim that the internet was actually created by government research.
Crovitz's argument? Well, Xerox had to cook up the internet, because it couldn't wait for those dithering government researchers to make it happen. Xerox hired Robert Taylor, the guy who ran the Department of Defense's ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) Information Processing Technologies program in the 1960s to run Xerox PARC's computer lab.
"If the government didn't invent the Internet, who did?" Crovitz writes, adding: "Full credit goes to the company where Mr. Taylor worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox."
Xerox maintains a decade-by-decade list of its technological accomplishments on its website. And while it's eager to take credit for Ethernet, the graphical user interface, and the PC, Xerox doesn't take credit for the internet.
Why not? "Robert Metcalfe, researcher at PARC, invented Ethernet as a way to connect Xerox printers and the Alto computer," Xerox spokesman Bill McKee said on Monday. "But inventing Ethernet is not the same as inventing the internet."
In other words, don't confuse a network of computers with the birthplace of TCP/IP and lolcats.
To be fair, Xerox invented a lot more than just Ethernet. And many of the things that came out of Xerox -- the PC and the graphical user interface -- were crucial to the internet as we know it today, according to Robert Taylor, who we interviewed Monday.
To hear Taylor tell it, finding the inventor of the internet is a bit like finding the inventor of the blues. Its origins are murky and complex.
"The origins of the internet include work both sponsored by the government and Xerox PARC, so you can't say that the internet was invented by either one alone," he says.
So would the internet have been invented without the government? "That's a tough question," he says. "Private industry does not like to start brand new directions in technology. Private industry is conservative by nature. So the ARPAnet probably could not have been built by private industry. It was deemed to be a crazy idea at the time."
In fact, Taylor says, the two biggest computer and telecommunications companies back in the 1960s were pretty hostile to two of the big ideas behind the internet: time-sharing computing (IBM liked batch processing) and packet switching (AT&T liked circuit switching).
"Both AT&T and IBM were invited to join the ARPAnet and they both refused," he says.
Michael Hiltzik, the LA Times journalist who wrote the definitive biography of Xerox PARC, Dealers of Lightning, provides a definitive debunking of Crovitz's argument here.
