I was just thinking that we should thank Al Gore for inventing the Internet.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

(Yeah, I know....) But what would this coronafuck have been like if it had happened in, say, 1980? You wouldn't have been able to work at home at almost any job, or order stuff you needed online because there wasn't any online, or communicate quickly with people all over the world, or find out what was going on instantly instead of waiting for the evening news, or get instant information about quarantines, closings, etc. It sucks but it would have been even worse before the Internet.

Of course, the Internet can also provide bad information and scare the crap out of you. But overall, it's a good thing to have. Thanks, Al!

[dewsgirl]

1. Can you imagine going through this without the internet?😬

[Hekate]

2. I would've gone stir-crazy long ago

[tanyev]

3. Oh man, there would have been millions infected before doctors/scientists

had any idea what to do about it.

[unc70]

4. Did not invent, but certainly got it out to the public

Gore led the effort to make it for the general public. Gets a lot of undeserved ridicule much like Carter got for the solar panels.

[htuttle]

5. Vincent Cerf thought Gore should get a lot of credit

(Cerf invented TCP/IP)

https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt

Before it went public, it was ARPANET, wasn't it? So, in a way...

[unc70]

7. I know Cerf and agree

It was ARPAnet, NSFnet, NCREN, and a lot of other things that gradually were merged together. Some predate the ARPA work by 6-8 years.

[klook]

8. Thanks for the link. (nt)

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

6. Yes, that's why I said "Yeah, I know."

He was derided for allegedly having claimed to invent the Internet, which he neither did nor claimed to have done. But he was instrumental in promoting and supporting its development when he was in Congress.

[SWBTATTReg]

9. Al Gore didn't invent the Internet. This was lots of technicians, such as those working at AOL, ...

the telephone companies, etc. all working together to piece together the data network, and bring it to life. Enough of this Al Gore crap.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

10. See above. I was being ironic.

I know he didn't invent it but he was instrumental in helping make it available to the public.

[SWBTATTReg]

11. I know but I worked literally in my career w/ hundreds of technicians back in the day ...

to get rid of thousands of private lines (very expensive to rent/lease/etc.) to migrate our private lines to an internet based / private virtual circuit network to save literally hundreds of millions of dollars annually for the Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs).

When we split off from the old AT&T, we had the use of tens of thousands of private lines from AT&T (all of the RBOCs), which we had to pay for, which was very expensive, thus the push by the RBOCs to go to a virtual network, to reduce costs.

This in turn, raised the commercial prospects at that time to sell the capacity to American Online, and other online companies, as well as other businesses to use the virtual network too.

He was (Al Gore) one of the primary pushers of the internet, but there were tons of people pushing for such a network, including a lot of computer companies back then (early 1980s), as there wasn't any nationwide data networks really in place, unless it was a private one established by a company for their own use, e.g., a gas station company getting credit card approvals, etc.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

12. The worker bees seldom get the credit they deserve, so I also thank you

and your co-workers for the Internet. We'd be in even tougher shape right now without it.

[SWBTATTReg]

13. We sure didn't get the credit back then, so thank you very much, not just for me, but literally,

for hundreds and thousands of us, installing the hardware, data network, and software.

Being that 'data' (between computers) back then was so new, and the phone companies and everyone else were only knowledgeable about the voice world (analog), it was totally new to everyone. It was all IT guys working on establishing this whole new thing into the RBOCs, of which literally everything, everything was totally foreign in concept to the regular telephone company people, being that they only worked in the voice world/analog. We're proud of what it came out to be today (the internet) and I confess, none of us ever expected what we see today. We tried to visualize (for our marketing dept. guys/gals) what possible uses would such a network give users, and none of our wildest guesses came close to reality that it is today.

Amazing. At least I still have my name on some internet standards that we established for the Industry (data communications). I know this because my nephew called me out of the blue one day, and asked me about one standard that he said my name was attached to (he was populating some data records w/ some billing/network data). I was surprised (pleasantly actually).

Thank you and be safe and careful today. This (the internets) are a blessing, you're absolutely right in that statement.