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by p1dda8 hours ago |
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upvoteby Y-bar8 hours ago|
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Exactly as many as the USA has founding fathers, give or take a few. Which is to say less than in the Fathers of Mercy.
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upvoteby baxtr8 hours ago|
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Al Gore is definitely one of them!
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upvoteby cxr8 hours ago|
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> There's always some nincompoop who brings that up. Al Gore deserves credit for what he did as a senator and vice president. He helped to pass legislation that enabled the NSFNET backbone to grow and to permit commercial traffic to flow on the government-sponsored backbones in the US. Had he not done that, it's pretty likely that the commercial sector would not have seen an opportunity to create a commercial internet that all of us can enjoy, so he does deserve some credit for what he's done.

— Vint Cerf, Tracking the Internet into the 21st Century <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf0rjtnwC9A>

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upvoteby throw0101a8 hours ago|
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> Al Gore is definitely one of them!

Al Gore Jr.'s father, the Sr., was instrumental in enacting the US Interstate Highway system:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Gore_Sr.#U.S._Senate

Which transformed the economy for physical goods. Jr saw parallels with the transportation of information, and coined a term (in 1978!) about it:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_superhighway

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...

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upvoteby dctoedt8 hours ago|
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> Al Gore is definitely one of them!

Absolutely correct — and that's not sarcasm or irony. (Gore never claimed to have "invented the Internet"; that was a calumny spread by Republicans.)

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upvoteby greenchair8 hours ago|
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1999 CNN interview where Gore stated: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet".
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upvoteby gilrain7 hours ago|
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And that was true, within his context as senator. He was instrumental in passing the laws that fostered the Internet.

It’s astonishing, I know, but the heavily-parroted meme was always reductive and is, at this point, misnformation.

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upvoteby 7 hours ago|
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deleted
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upvoteby My_Name8 hours ago|
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You have to wonder about the "Mother of the Internet" at this point...
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upvoteby wbl1 hours ago|
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Radia Perlman is the name that jumps to mind for me, but there are a bunch of others.
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upvoteby slim8 hours ago|
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DoD
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upvoteby fragmede8 hours ago|
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The two that are most widely recognized are Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, for TCP/IP, but that's just the start of it. There's JCR Licklider, who first imagined a global network of computers. There's Leonard Kleinrock, first ARPANET nod and packet-switching theory. Larry Roberts, who led development of ARPANET. Paul Baran independently invented packet switching. Donald Davies coined the term "packet" and also developed packet switching. Louis Pouzin also worked on TCP/IP. Jon Postel managed the IP standards and address assignments for decades. Ray Tomlinson invented email and the @ sign. Of course, we can't forget Tim Berneres-Lee, to whom we credit the invention of the web (HTTP, HTML, URLS, the first web browser and server).

So, eleven.

The Dream Machine is a history book by M. Mitchell Waldrop that tells the story of JCR Licklider.

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upvoteby mahouk5 hours ago|
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Vannevar Bush?
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upvoteby fragmede9 minutes ago|
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Ooh, hadn't heard of him. From Wikipedia, V. Bush is famous for, among other things, creating the NSF, the memex, an analog microfilm precusor to hypertext, and his essay "As We May Think" in 1945. Definitely influential in the creation of our world today!
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