“Is it possible I invented the whole damn Internet?”

As Timothy B. Lee at Ars Technica puts it, in response to a stunning piece of political correctness (chock full of factual incorrectness), "The Wall Street Journal has earned a reputation for producing in-depth and meticulously fact-checked news coverage. Unfortunately, it doesn't always apply that same high standard of quality to their editorial page."

Opening with SciAm blogger Michael Moyer, in a post titled Yes, Government Researchers Really Did Invent the Internet

“It’s an urban legend that the government launched the Internet,” writes Gordon Crovitz in an opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal. Most histories cite the Pentagon-backed ARPANet as the Internet’s immediate predecessor, but that view undersells the importance of research conducted at Xerox PARC labs in the 1970s, claims Crovitz. In fact, Crovitz implies that, if anything, government intervention gummed up the natural process of laissez faire innovation.
...
But Crovitz’s story is based on a profound misunderstanding of not only history, but technology. Most egregiously, Crovitz seems to confuse the Internet—at heart, a set of protocols designed to allow far-flung computer networks to communicate with one another—with Ethernet, a protocol for connecting nearby computers into a local network. (Robert Metcalfe, a researcher at Xerox PARC who co-invented the Ethernet protocol, today tweeted tongue-in-cheek “Is it possible I invented the whole damn Internet?”)
...
Other commenters, including Timothy B. Lee at Ars Technica and veteran technology reporter Steve Wildstrom, have noted that Crovitz’s misunderstandings run deep. He also manages to confuse the World Wide Web (incidentally, invented by Tim Berners Lee while working at CERN, a government-funded research laboratory) with hyperlinks, and an internet—a link between two computers—with THE Internet.

But perhaps the most damning rebuttal comes from Michael Hiltzik, the author [of] “Dealers of Lightning,” a history of Xerox PARC that Crovitz uses as his main source for material. “While I’m gratified in a sense that he cites my book,” writes Hiltzik, “it’s my duty to point out that he’s wrong. My book bolsters, not contradicts, the argument that the Internet had its roots in the ARPANet, a government project.”

Alex Pareene at Salon writes

So, basically, the government had its grubby innovation-suppressing paws all over the creation of the Internet, a fact reinforced by Michael Hiltzik’s response to Gordon Crovitz in the L.A. Times. (Hiltzik is the author of a book cited by Crovitz in his column.) Basically Crovitz got everything wrong:

Crovitz then points out that TCP/IP, the fundamental communications protocol of the Internet, was invented by Vinton Cerf (though he fails to mention Cerf’s partner, Robert Kahn). He points out that Tim Berners-Lee “gets credit for hyperlinks.”

Lots of problems here. Cerf and Kahn did develop TCP/IP — on a government contract! And Berners-Lee doesn’t get credit for hyperlinks–that belongs to Doug Engelbart of Stanford Research Institute, who showed them off in a legendary 1968 demo you can see here. Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web–and he did so at CERN, a European government consortium.

And finally, Ethernet was “by no means a precursor of the Internet.” So: Government created the Internet, just like we thought before. Even the ornery libertarian-leaning geeks of Slashdot concede the point.

(One more fun fact: Al Gore genuinely did have a formative role in creating the Internet! The 1991 bill that funded, among lots of other important-for-the-development-of-the-Internet things, the creation of Mosaic, the mother of all web browsers, was known as "the Gore Bill." And Mosaic was created by a government-funded unit at the public University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The government invented the Internet.)

People familiar with the history of the Internet will, obviously, barely notice this attempt at partisan revisionism. But I am very confident that “The Government Had Nothing To Do With Inventing The Internet That Is a Liberal Lie” will become one of those wonderful myths.... You’ll be seeing this one pop up — as common knowledge, probably — in Corner posts and Fox News hits for years to come. When some random idiot Republican candidate in 2014 or 2016 makes the rounds on the blogs for claiming that the private sector invented in the Internet, just remember that it all started right here, in the Wall Street Journal.

UPDATE: Oh, lord. Two minutes after publishing I see that Fox’s John Stossel is on board with the new narrative!

Steve Wildstrom sums it up:

The history of the internet is not particularly in dispute and we have the great good fortune that most of the pioneers who made it happen are still with us and able to share their stories. (For example, my video interviews with Cerf and Kahn.) In a nutshell, the internet began as a Defense Dept. research project designed to create a way to facilitate communication among research networks. It was almost entirely the work of government employees and contractors. It was split into military and civilian pieces, the latter run by the National Science Foundation. By the early 1990s, businesses were starting to see commercial possibilities and the private sector began building networks that connected with NSFnet. After initially resisting commercialization, NSF gave in and withdrew from the internet business in 1995, fully privatizing the network.

To paraphrase Yogi Berra, you can look it up in a book–or a web site.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose."

As prompted by the Vanity Fair article, Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant
"Stack Management"

Eichenwald’s conversations reveal that a management system known as “stack ranking”—a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor—effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”

"Fumbling the Future" *

According to Eichenwald, Microsoft had a prototype e-reader ready to go in 1998, but when the technology group presented it to Bill Gates he promptly gave it a thumbs-down, saying it wasn’t right for Microsoft. “He didn’t like the user interface, because it didn’t look like Windows,” a programmer involved in the project recalls.
“Windows was the god—everything had to work with Windows,” Stone tells Eichenwald. “Ideas about mobile computing with a user experience that was cleaner than with a P.C. were deemed unimportant by a few powerful people in that division, and they managed to kill the effort.”

* For a refresher on the above etymology, I've pulled a few excerpts from the book Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer (1988):

Alan Turing

From the BBC site:

The life and achievements of Alan Turing - the mathematician, codebreaker, computer pioneer, artificial intelligence theoretician, and gay/cultural icon - are being celebrated to mark what would have been his 100th birthday on 23 June.
To mark the occasion the BBC has commissioned a series of essays to run across the week, starting with this overview of Turing's legacy by Vint Cerf.

His is a story of astounding highs and devastating lows. A story of a genius whose mathematical insights helped save thousands of lives, yet who was unable to save himself from social condemnation, with tragic results. Ultimately though, it's a story of a legacy that laid the foundations for the modern computer age.
In 1936, while at King's College, Cambridge, Turing published a seminal paper On Computable Numbers which introduced two key concepts - "algorithms" and "computing machines" - that continue to play a central role in our industry today.
Computing before computers
He is remembered most vividly for his work on cryptanalysis at Bletchley Park during World War II, developing in 1940 the so-called electro-mechanical Bombe used to determine the correct rotor and plugboard settings of the German Enigma encryptor to decrypt intercepted messages.
It would be hard to overstate the importance of this work for the Allies in their conduct of the war.
After the war, Turing worked on the design of of the Automatic Computing Engine (Ace) at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and in 1946, he delivered a paper on the design of a stored program computer.
His work was contemporary with another giant in computer science, John von Neumann, who worked on the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (Edvac).
Ace and Edvac were binary machines and both broke new conceptual ground with the notion of a program stored in memory that drove the operation of the machine.
Storing a program in the computer's memory meant that the program could alter itself, opening up remarkable new computing vistas.

Other essays include

The codebreaker who saved 'millions of lives' by Prof Jack Copeland
Jack Copeland is professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. He has also built the Turing Archive for the History of Computing, an extensive online resource.

Is he really the father of computing? by Prof Simon Lavington
Simon Lavington is the author of Alan Turing and his Contemporaries: Building the World's First Computers and a former professor of computer science at the University of Essex.

The experiment that shaped artificial intelligence by Prof Noel Sharkey

Gay codebreaker's defiance keeps memory alive by Andrew Hodges
Andrew Hodges is a tutorial fellow in mathematics at Wadham College, University of Oxford, and author of Alan Turing: the enigma.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad