How the Web Was Won

Rush Limbaugh, who started online, like a lot of us, on CompuServe in the 1980s (before signing them up as an early show sponsor) walks through the history of How the Web Was Won in a surprisingly detailed timeline, to rebut Obama’s know-nothing boast that “Government research created the Internet so that all companies could make money off the Internet:”

So, Crovitz writes, “If the government didn’t invent the Internet, who did? Vinton Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol, the Internet’s backbone, and Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for hyperlinks.” Do you know what TCP/IP is?  What? How would you explain TCP/IP to somebody?  Somebody in Rio Linda. (interruption) It’s like the phone number of a computer network.  It’s like the phone number of a computer. Okay, TCP/IP.  And hyperlinks, it’s obvious.  That’s the link in a story that you click to take you to some other site.  Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for creating the hyperlink.

“According to a book about Xerox PARC, ‘Dealers of Lightning’ (by Michael Hiltzik), its top researchers realized they couldn’t wait for the government to connect different networks, so would have to do it themselves.”  I mean, the government did create this labyrinth, but they didn’t know what to do with it. At no time were they even pondering commercial applications for this, which is the point.  Ah, you can debate — and people are gonna debate this ’til the end of time — whether it was a network communications system for nuclear attack; whether it was this or whether it was that.

The point that Crovitz is making here is that whatever it was and why it ever was invented, it was never intended by the government for commercial application.  And had it been left to the government and had it remained the sole property of the government, it wouldn’t exist today.  That’s all you really need to know about this.  And yet Obama is running around claiming credit for it, as Algore did, and making it one of the reasons businesses — (whispers) “corporations” — are successful.

Follow this Web-enabling hyperlink to connect your computer to Rush’s server to read the whole thing.

Related: Obama’s line about the Internet was yet another gaffe in the Speech That Keeps On Giving. As Jennifer Rubin wrote this week at the Washington Post:

Smarting from the attack on his “you didn’t build that”speech the Obama team is inexplicably running a whiny, defensive ad saying, “Those ads taking my words about small business out of context, they’re flat out wrong.” Wow. This is his version of the “I am not a witch” ad.

And of course, the liberal Bletchley Park has checked their magic decoder rings to inform you that accurately quoting the president’s words to reveal his socialist worldview is racist. Sorry, fellas — as even Jon Stewart has admitted, that race card was  maxed out long ago.

(H/T: 5’F)