Here’s what Internet guru Vinton Cerf told the Post’s John Schwartz:
SCHWARTZ: Vinton G. Cerf, a senior vice president at MCI Worldcom and the person most often called “the father of the Internet” for his part in designing the network’s common computer language, said in an e-mail interview yesterday, “I think it is very fair to say that the Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given it and related research areas by the vice president in his current role and in his earlier role as senator.”
According to Schwartz, Katie Hafner, co-author of a history of the Internet, “agreed” with that assessment:
SCHWARTZ: Hafner said people have been haggling over the true beginnings of the network for decades. “...[T]here are so many people who did at least one pivotal thing in either creating the network, or encouraging the use of the network, or bringing the network to the public--and Gore was one of those people.”
William Greider wrote this, in a Rolling Stone profile published before the recent flap:
GREIDER: [Gore] held the first congressional hearings on industry’s casual disposal of toxic wastes and on global warming, and he was an early champion of the system we now call the Internet.
Chuck Raasch, of USA Today, quoted University of Pennsylvania professor Dave Farber, whom Schwartz described as “one of the early players in the Internet:”
RAASCH: Dave Farber, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told [The Commercial Appeal of Memphis], “Gore did not technically create the Internet, but without him there is a good chance it would not be where it is today.”
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