Al Gore didn’t invent the Internet, although that was a running joke for a decade or more. But in January 1994, my parents didn’t know what the Internet was. Most other people didn’t at that point either. Al Gore helped bring it into the public consciousness by using the phrase Information Superhighway in a keynote he delivered January 11, 1994.
Al Gore’s concept of an Information Superhighway
Gore uttered the phrase as the keynote speaker at The Superhighway Summit in UCLA’s Royce Hall. “We have a dream for…an information superhighway that can save lives, create jobs and give every American, young and old, the chance for the best education available to anyone, anywhere.”
But January 11, 1994 wasn’t his first recorded use of the phrase. He also used it in September 1993, in a report titled Technology for America’s Economic Growth. which called for a “nationwide information superhighway,” which would primarily be built by private industry.
The phrase quickly came into widespread use. I remember installing OS/2 Warp in late 1994, and it contained a folder labeled Information Superhighway that held a web browser and other Internet utilities like a Telnet client.
Did Al Gore invent the Internet?
The idea that Al Gore invented the Internet came not from the 1994 keynote, but a later interview. On March 9, 1999, in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Blitzer asked why Democrats should support him for president over his opponent Bill Bradley. In part, Gore said in response:
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
The claim became a long running joke among people who worked in technology in the 1990s and actually could claim to have built some of the modern Internet. But even Newt Gingrich, no friend of Gore, gives him some credit.
Gore is not the Father of the Internet, but in all fairness, Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet… the fact is, in the Clinton administration, the world we had talked about in the ’80s began to actually happen.
The Gore Bill
When he claimed he took the initiative in creating the Internet, Gore may have been thinking of The Gore Bill. The Gore Bill was officially known as the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991, which allocated $600 million for high performance computing and for the creation of the National Research and Education Network. The NREN brought together industry, academia and government in a joint effort to accelerate the development and deployment of gigabit per second networking. It was commonly called the Gore Bill because Al Gore sponsored it.
The Gore Bill also helped fund the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, where a team of programmers created the Mosaic Web browser, the commercial Internet’s technological springboard, and the common ancestor of both Internet Explorer and Netscape.
The oligarch Marc Andreessen is only a billionaire because The Gore Bill funded the NCSA, where Andreessen made his name writing code for Mosaic before graduating to Netscape. In spite of what his manifesto says, he didn’t pull himself up by his bootstraps. The NCSA did.
The counterpoint
But the Internet already existed while this was going on. For that matter, so did the World Wide Web, the part of the Internet everyone cared about. That was Tim Berners-Lee’s invention. Gore wasn’t creating the Internet so much as he was raising public awareness of it and creating legislation and public policy to encourage its growth. The Internet was going to happen. But there is little doubt that Gore’s efforts helped push it along much faster.
If you ever hear two Gen Xers joke about Al Gore inventing the Internet, that’s where this came from.
The irony is that the Internet probably would have happened with or without Al Gore, but without Al Gore, Marc Andreessen might have just been another random programmer at some random company.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.