BlindBoo
Diamond Member
- Sep 28, 2010
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Nice admission. In reality he claimed he provided the initiative......and he did.
24 Jun 1986: Albert Gore introduced S 2594 Supercomputer Network Study Act of 1986[4]
As a Senator, Gore began to craft the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 (commonly referred to as "The Gore Bill"[5]) after hearing the 1988 reportToward a National Research Network[6] submitted to Congress by a group chaired by UCLA professor of computer science, Leonard Kleinrock, one of the central creators of theARPANET (the ARPANET, first deployed by Kleinrock and others in 1969, is the predecessor of the Internet).[7]
Indeed, Kleinrock would later credit both Gore and the Gore Bill as a critical moment in Internet history:
A second development occurred around this time, namely, then-Senator Al Gore, a strong and knowledgeable proponent of the Internet, promoted legislation that resulted in President George H.W Bush signing the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991. This Act allocated $600 million for high performance computing and for the creation of the National Research and Education Network [13–14]. The NREN brought together industry, academia and government in a joint effort to accelerate the development and deployment of gigabit/sec networking.[8]
The bill was passed on Dec. 9, 1991 and led to the National Information Infrastructure (NII)[9] which Gore referred to as the "information superhighway". President George H. W. Bush predicted that the bill would help "unlock the secrets of DNA," open up foreign markets to free trade, and a promise of cooperation between government, academia, and industry.[10]
Prior to its passage, Gore discussed the basics of the bill in an article for the September 1991 issue of Scientific American entitled Scientific American presents the September 1991 Single Copy Issue: Communications, Computers, and Networks. His essay, "Infrastructure for the Global Village", commented on the lack of network access described above and argued: "Rather than holding back, the U.S. should lead by building the information infrastructure, essential if all Americans are to gain access to this transforming technology"[11] [...] "high speed networks must be built that tie together millions of computers, providing capabilities that we cannot even imagine."[12]
Mosaic[edit]
Perhaps one of the most important results of the Gore Bill was the development of Mosaic in 1993.[13][14] This World Wide Web browser is credited by most scholars as beginning the Internet boom of the 1990s:
Gore's legislation also helped fund the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, where a team of programmers, including Netscape founderMarc Andreessen, created the Mosaic Web browser, the commercial Internet's technological springboard. 'If it had been left to private industry, it wouldn't have happened,' Andreessen says of Gore's bill, 'at least, not until years later.'[15]
Al Gore and information technology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
