[vcf-midatlantic] oldest email address in the club

[Dave McGuire]

On 09/08/2016 11:41 AM, David Riley wrote:
>>> The InterNIC became Network Solutions when Al Gore invented the
>>> commercial Internet - an event we all remember.
>>
>>  Yeah the Al Gore thing was the source of endless laughter. :)
> 
> To be fair:
> 
> a) He never actually claimed to have invented the Internet
> 
> b) What he DID claim, which was totally correct, was that he was responsible in large part for the funding that brought the Internet to the public

  I disagree, very loudly.

  Having built and managed much of the infrastructure for one of the
first public ISPs, I can categorically state that we did not receive one
red cent from Al Gore, the federal government, or anyone else other than
ourselves.  We lived on ramen noodles and lots of couch-sharing, and
built it all starting from a pair of used Sun-3 systems up to the third
largest ISP on the planet.  ZERO help from Al Gore.

  The funding that his efforts resulted in went primarily to the growth
of backbone services, like the NSFnet backbone.  This was good of
course, and we were an NSFnet backbone node (ENSS 230, if that means
anything to anyone else here), but it was well on its way and would've
happened without any of that.  And we were a fully functional public ISP
long before it finished morphing into ANSnet on T3 lines.

  Let's not give Al Gore too much credit.  The foundations were already
laid and the infrastructure was already there, and the
closer-to-the-user stuff was never touched by anything he did.

            -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA