Al Gore pioneered legislative building blocks, to help establish Internet infrastructure, also referred to in D.C as "intiatives". When speaking on CNN about executing such "intiatives", it was spun out of context to mean he took the intiative to invent the internet. California Draft Gore has assembled a brief synopsis detailing the events which involved Al becoming the punchline of a politcal spin. It all starts with his legislative actions, historically known as the "Gore Bill".
The Gore bill:
Gore began to craft the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 (commonly referred to as The Gore Bill) after hearing the 1988 report Toward a National Research Network submitted to Congress by a group chaired by UCLA professor of computer science, Leonard Kleinrock, one of the central creators of the ARPANET. He discussed the basics of this bill in an article for the highly regarded September 1991 issue of Scientific American, entitled Scientific American presents the September 1991 Single Copy Issue: Communications, Computers, and Networks. In His essay, Infrastructure for the Global Village,
"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...high speed networks must be built that tie together millions of computers, providing capabilities that we cannot even imagine" Al Gore - 1991
The bill was passed on Dec. 9, 1991 and led to the NII or National Information Infrastructure which Gore referred to as the Information superhighway. President George H. W. Bush predicted that this 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.
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 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]. The NREN brought together industry, academia and government in a joint effort to accelerate the development and deployment of gigabit/sec networking.
In the early 1990s the Internet was big news...In the fall of 1990 there were just 313,000 computers on the Internet; by 1996, there were close to 10 million. The networking idea became politicized during the 1992 Clinton-Gore election campaign, where the rhetoric of the 'information highway' captured the public imagination. On taking office in 1993, the new administration set in place a range of government initiatives for a National Information Infrastructure aimed at ensuring that all American citizens ultimately gain access to the new networks.
As Vice-President, Gore continued to promote this vision of the Information Superhighway. In February 1993, President Clinton and Vice President Gore submitted a report, Technology for America's Economic Growth which outlined the ways in which their administration planned further development of what Gore referred to as the Information Superhighway by the year 2000. Al Gore became the first U.S. vice president to hold a live interactive news conference on a computer network.
Perhaps one of the most important results of the bill was the development of the Mosaic (web browser) in 1993, the World Wide Web browser, which was developed under High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, a program created by the High Performance Computing Act of 1991. Mosaic is generally credited by most scholars as beginning the Internet boom of the 1990s.
1999 CNN interview
As a result of the publication of three articles in Wired News, Gore's 1999-03-09 interview on CNN's Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer became the subject of heavy satire.During this interview, Gore stated:
"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."
Media reports surrounding this statement sometimes re-wrote it, stating that Gore claimed he "invented the internet".Gore received support from members of the computer industry, however, notably Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Robert E. Kahn. Cerf and Kahn issued the following statement on 2000-09-28 in response to the controversy:
"As the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time."
Last year the Vice President made a straightforward statement on his role. He said:
"During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
In response to this controversy in 2000, Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn wrote:
"...We don't think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he "invented" the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening. We feel it is timely to offer our perspective."
Gore has continued to be involved with the computer industry. He has been a member of the board of directors of Apple Inc. Since 2003 and serves as a Senior Advisor to Google Inc. In 2005, the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences honored Gore at The Webby Awards with the Lifetime Achievement Award "for three decades of contributions to the Internet". The Webby Awards, which are widely hailed as the Oscars of the web, "wanted to set the record straight" according to Tiffany Shlain, the awards' founder and chairwoman. She further stated,
"It's just one of those instances someone did amazing work for three decades as Congressman, Senator and Vice President and it got spun around into this political mess."