Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown MP, put his foot in his mouth in true Al Gore style (Gore claimed in March that he was instrumental in creating the internet) during his keynote speech at the first UK Internet Summit in London yesterday. Barely had his speech begun when Brown declared: 30 years ago this month the internet was invented in Britain.
Brown’s unqualified statement flies in the face of accepted wisdom, which suggests the first electronic communication between two computers took place between UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute in the United States over the Arpanet, some time in October 1969. BrownÆs writers are perhaps getting confused with the web, which was invented by Tim Berners-Lee, a Briton, at the beginning of the nineties.
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