The quote of the week award must go to Vice President Al information superhighway Gore’s comments during a CNN interview last Tuesday. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the internet, said a modest Gore, while extolling his virtues over competing Democratic presidential hopeful Bill Bradley. Gore, of course, was just 21 and eight years away from joining Congress when the Arpanet defense network that was the precursor of the internet first emerged in 1969.
A spokesperson for the vice president made things worse by claiming that, if Gore hadn’t invented the internet, then he had certainly invented information technology. Gore was the leader in Congress on the connections between data transmission and computing power, what we today call information technology claimed Chris Lehane. And those efforts helped to create the internet that we know today. He said that Al Gore senior’s role in negotiating the legislation that created a US national highway network in the 1950s served as a model for the vice president’s vision for a network of data highways.
