Five unbelievable headlines that claim Tim Berners-Lee 'INVENTED the INTERNET' Newspapers and blogs are quite rightly back-slapping Brit inventor Tim Berners-Lee today – the man who brought the world wide web to the, er, world 25 years ago today. It's a pity, then, that mainstream publications continue to stumble over the concept by lazily and wrongly saying that Berners-Lee birthed the internet. Sub- …
This post has been deleted by its author
"It's a series of tubes.
There's an adapter mid-Atlantic (and Pacific) to change from imperial to metric size tubes."
Exactly, as Steve Knox said.
The tubes on one side of the adapters use Imperial Protocol (IP) - that's ours - and the tubes on the other side use, er, Their Crappy Protocol.
(Okay, okay, I couldn't think of a synonym for metric that begins with C!)
It won't actually be Al Gore, but his publicist who will contact you and correct your misconception.
The funny thing is that Al Gore claimed to have sponsored the bill that gave money to DARPA to fund the R&D for the internet. If memory serves... I don't believe he was the bill's sponsor but a co-sponsor...
(A bit of a big difference.)
Sort of.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Performance_Computing_and_Communication_Act_of_1991
ARPANET was the real birth of IP communication, which preceded the internet. When I was in the military back around 1986, we had a node in our computer room. Periodically someone from BBN http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBN_Technologies would call me to input some commands into the teletype. Later, when I was going to get out, the guy that I talked to wanted me to submit a resume and apply for a job. I didn't, and in retrospect, I wish I had.
ARPANET was the real birth of IP communication, which preceded the internet.
Not exactly.
ARPANET originally used NCP, which was first specified in 1969.
IP was first specified in 1974.
ARPANET switched from NCP to TCP/IP in 1983 (the Big Switch). If you consider ARPANET "the Internet" (as opposed to just "an internet") prior to '83, as many do, then the Internet was NCP before it was TCP/IP.
You may have some other definition of "the Internet" and its point of origin, but internets definitely existed before IP was defined, much less before ARPANET switched to it.
While this is genuinely amusing, especially for the likes of us Regtards. I work with people everyday for whom 'the web' and 'the internet' are exactly the same thing, and in many cases, both terms mean almost nothing.
Actual conversation i had while trying to help someone access an online database.
me - open your browser
them - what's that?
me - (realising my mistake) the thing you use to get on the internet
them - oh, you mean google.
(the worst thing here, is the didn't even have google as their home page)
i really, really wish this is the only time this has happened to me, but it's not, and i suspect it's because generally speaking, the general public don't care what this fancy tech stuff is called, as long as they can get what they want from it.
Which i realise is missing the point a little, and yes, those who report the news, really should know better.
In circa 1983 I knew of a secretary in our office, near to retirement, who'd had her manual typewriter removed and replaced by "one of those word processor thingies" with a screen, printer and everything. Bless her, she struggled with the delete key. Well, actually I assume she couldn't find it if the amount of correction fluid on the screen was anything to go by...
Slightly off-topic. But I used to have meetings in a school with a SEN teacher who didn't know you could save documents (only a few years back). So each time she got called away from her office in the middle of a confidential report she'd turn the machine off and then have to start again later..
Text Message from the Mother:
"Darling, can you stop changing the internet every other day"
[reply]
"What do you mean?"
[mum]
"the google, you keep changing the google on my computer. I like yesterdays one better. Just keep it as that"
[reply]
"No mum, I don't change the google logo, google changes that."
[mum]
"You don't run the google?"
[reply]
"No, if I did I wouldn't be driving a fiesta"
No, usually, at least from the techy-support stuff I've done it's "MY Internet's down"; what, you have your own personal Internet now…?! This article validates my pedantry; the number of times I've corrected folk and got "Same thing, innit…?!" I've tried to analogise by saying that calling the WWW 'the Internet' is like calling Windows 'your computer', but they NEVER seem to get it… You'd have thought that, with most of 'em being able to recall a time prior to the WWW's existence, they'd be a little more savvy. My father's been working in tech on-and-off for much of his working life (though never in a 'techy' capacity (he's an accountant by training, and did a lot of work for Sinclair and Prism (the software arm of Sinclair Ltd, for those who don't know, and it's why our loft is an homage to early-mid '80s tech) and I know at least one of the companies he worked for used a BBS (this was back in the days before BBS came to stand for 'Boobs, Beavers and Sex'. Remember all those '0898' premium-rate BBSs that used to be advertised in the classified sections of some computer mags…? I SWEAR I've some old Amiga Actions somewhere with ads for 'PornHub' boards…
"All Your Internet Are Belong To Us"
My mum phoned me recently to say her google wasn't working (meaning the internet, and not specifically google). I can't complain though. It was only a few months ago that I finally got her to use a computer.
I remember back in the days of dial-up, (when I was back living with the folks for a while) my dad would assume all his non-networked programs would run really slowly if I was downloading something on my computer at the same time!
Yeah, we can laugh, but computers and the internet have long been a consumer product - but it still doesn't excuse the newspapers from making the mistake. That's just sloppy journalism.
We can make of fun of people who act this way and bemoan their ignorance, but there is a sense in which they have a valid point. Without the www the internet wouldn't be what it is today. It might be better, it might be worse, but it wouldn't be what it is.
That's not to belittle all the work done by all of the folks who transformed ARPA into the internet, just to recognize that without the www, most people would care even less about them.
"Beat me to it. And I bet not many people off the top of their head know what a petard was and why it was bad to be "hoisted" by it (quotes intentional)."
Hate to burst your little superiority bubble, but most people who've been here for - three years or so?are well aware. We've had the supercilious lectures before when the petard quote has been used/mis quoted. You *were* right about being beaten to it, though you don't seem to realise by how much, so not a complete failure.
As the OED says about petards and hoisting:
Have one’s plans to cause trouble for others backfire on one
Ms Fiveash's article was intended to "cause trouble" for the non-tech media because they got a word wrong only to get a word wrong herself.
It may be the middle of the night here and I may be dyslexic but I don't see a problem with my comment about her use of "worldwide" instead of 'world wide".
It's the way you rephrased it that people are pointing out.
As you say, "hoist with his own petard" is a reference to a plan backfiring, but note that in the saying the word is hoist, rather than hoisted. Hoisted is a past tense of hoist, but so is hoist itself, and since that's the word used in the saying, I've long since concluded that people expect it to be the word used in reference to it (and some people just frown on the word "hoisted" anyway).
Also, your rephrasing you didn't in any way suggest Kelly was hoist with the petard - so your variation isn't a reference to something backfiring anyway.
At least, one or both of those is what I think people are getting at, anyway.
I strongly agree with Randy Hudson. Surely the correct forms are "the Internet" and "the [World Wide] Web". These are proper names, and therefore should be capitalized. I can't imagine why you (and others) lower-case them, unless it's simply a matter of trying to look trendy by avoiding as many capital letters as possible.
When working as an editor, I always advise writers that, if in any doubt about spelling a name, they should comply with the spelling used by its owner. I think you will find that the IETF refers to "the Internet" and W3C to "the World Wide Web".
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
