Al Gore
lorenetworking
United States senator, later vice president, whose 1991 legislation funded the research network and the supercomputing centre from which the commercial internet emerged; better known for a sentence he did not say.
Two facts sit on either side of the name. The first is what the legislation did. As a senator in the 1980s Gore pushed to join several dozen unconnected federal networks into one, and in January 1991 he introduced the bill that became the High Performance Computing Act, signed that December. It authorised about six hundred million dollars, funded the National Research and Education Network that carried the internet out of computer science into universities at large, and strengthened the supercomputing centres - among them NCSA in Illinois, where a group of students then wrote Mosaic, the browser that made the web a public thing. Andreessen, who led that group, said that left to private industry it would not have happened for years. The second fact is the quotation. On CNN in March 1999 Gore said he had taken the initiative in creating the internet - a claim about legislation, and an accurate one - which was cut down to the word invented and became a joke that outlived the facts. The people who wrote the internet's protocols answered it: Cerf and Kahn wrote in 2000 that no elected official had made a greater contribution over a longer period. The catalogue records both facts because the second is the one everybody knows and the first is the one that happened.
Also known as: gore bill, high performance computing act, nren
Sources
- Wikipedia, High Performance Computing Act of 1991: introduced in the Senate as S. 272 by Al Gore on 24 January 1991 and signed by President George H. W. Bush on 9 December 1991 as Public Law 102-194; often called the Gore Bill, it led to the National Information Infrastructure, the funding of the National Research and Education Network, and the High-Performance Computing and Communications programme
- Snopes, on the misquote: as a senator in the 1980s Gore urged agencies to consolidate several dozen unconnected federal networks into an interagency network, and working across the Reagan and Bush administrations secured passage of the 1991 Act, whose NREN initiative became one of the major vehicles for the spread of the internet beyond computer science; the 1999 CNN remark was that he took the initiative in creating the Internet, which was then widely misquoted
- Summary of the Act's effects: it authorised about 600 million dollars and strengthened NSF support for supercomputing centres including NCSA, where the Mosaic browser was built; Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn wrote in 2000 that Gore was the first political leader to recognise the importance of the internet and to promote and support its development, and that no other elected official had made a greater contribution over a longer period of time
- On the funding of NCSA and Mosaic: the legislation helped fund the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, where a team including Marc Andreessen created Mosaic; Andreessen said that if it had been left to private industry it would not have happened, at least not until years later; Phil Agre traced the origin of the invented-the-internet distortion in October 2000