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July 24, 2012
Bringing the Web to America
It has long been my conviction that anything appearing on the Wall Street Journal’s Editorial/Op-Ed pages is a lie. In fact, if there’s a paragraph appearing on those pages, in which you can’t spot an evident falsehood or obfuscation, then the problem is that you haven’t studied the topic, at hand, in sufficient depth.
On that note, it comes as no surprise that we “learn” [via Kevin Drum] that the Internet was the creation of private industry (specifically, Xerox PARC), not some nasty Government agency (DARPA). Nor is it surprising that the author of the book about PARC, on which the claims of the WSJ Op-Ed were based, promptly took to the pages of of the LA Times to debunk each and every paragraph. (See also Vint Cerf: “I would happily fertilize my tomatoes with Crovitz’ assertion.”)
Which leaves me little to do, but post a copy of this lecture, from 1999, by Paul Kunz of SLAC. The video quality is really bad, but this is (to my knowledge) the only extant copy. He tells a bit of the pre-history of the internet, and the role high energy physicists played.
As Michael Hiltzik alluded to, in his LA Times piece, AT&T (and, more relevant for Kunz’s story, the Europeen Telecoms) were dead-set against the internet, and did everything they could to smother it in its cradle. High energy physicists (who were, in turn, funded by …) played a surprising role in defeating them. (And yes, unsurprisingly, Al Gore makes a significant appearance towards the end.)
Enjoy ….
Paul Kunz: Bringing the Web to America
And now you know the answer to the trivia question: “What was the first website outside of Europe?”
Update:
For those unfamiliar with how this all works, Gordon Crovitz, the author of the hilariously wrong column in question, is the former publisher of the Wall Street Journal. And the column, itself, is now endlessly echoed and repeated in the wingnutosphere.July 8, 2012
Astral Pain
Anyone who’s followed this blog, since the early days, has read more than one instance of my complaints about crappy support for Unicode in common programming tools. I’m sad to report that, even in 2012, doing Unicode is (still) harder than it looks.
Heterotic Beast is my math-enabled Forum software. It runs on Rails 3.1.6 and Ruby 1.9.3, so you’d think that all would be good. Which was why I was surprised that this post was ill-formed.