Peter O sent me a link to the original 1994 web page for Vice President Al Gore kept by NARA, the National Archives and Records Administration (of the USA.) What is amusing is that this copy of Gore’s page looks really dated and positions him as a pioneer of the Internet:
Vice President Gore, having first coined the term “information superhighway” 17 years ago, is the recognized public leader in the development of the National Information Infrastructure (NII).
Not quite the same as saying he invented it. To see the page Gore’s page linked from go to the White House page. Many of the links work, though not Clinton’s page.
Do check out “Al Gore and the Internet” by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. Cerf and Kahn, most would agree, are two of the primary guys to actually invent the Internet (TCP/IP). The wrote a short piece about Al Gore, saying “Bob and I believe that the vice president deserves significant credit for his early recognition of the importance of what has become the Internet.” Thte whole piece is available here: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200009/msg00052.html
Interesting link. He deserves more credit than he gets.
Also, according to the fun Wikipedia article List of Common Misconceptions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions),
“Al Gore never said he invented the Internet, though he did state that “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet”(emphasis added).[19] Gore was the original drafter of the High Performance Computing Act of 1991, which provided significant funding for supercomputing centers, and this in turn led to upgrades of the Internet’s precursor, the NSFNet and development of NCSA Mosaic, later renamed to Netscape Navigator”