Who Really Invented the Internet?

 Recently, President Obama made the following statement: "The internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all companies could make money off the Internet."  Oh, how one has a tendency to embellish something that is not really true.  Remember, Senator Al Gore's claim that he developed the internet.  And no, the Pentagon did not create the internet.  Then again, bureaucrats like to elevate their own self-importance over entrepreneurs any day of the week.

If the government nor Senator Gore nor the Pentagon didn't invent the internet, who did?  According to Gordon Crovitz in today's Wall Street Journal, full credit goes to "Xerox PARC" labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s where the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks.

"According to a book about Xerox PARC, "Dealers of Lightning" (by Michael Hiltzik), its top researchers realized they couldn't wait for the government to connect different networks, so would have to do it themselves."  So having created the internet, why didn't Xerox become the biggest company in the world?  It was too focused on selling copiers.  From their standpoint, the Ethernet was important only so that people in an office could link computers to share a copier.  Then, in 1979, Steve Jobs negotiated an agreement whereby Xerox's venture-capital division invested $1 million in Apple, with the requirement that Jobs get a full briefing on all the Xerox PARC innovations.  They just had no idea what they had, Jobs later said, after launching hugely profitable Apple computers using concepts developed by Xerox."

Why is this diatribe about the internet important?  I would say to set the record straight, because it's too often wrongly cited to justify the existence of big government.