Who invented the Internet? If you ask this question, you are likely to get lots of different answers. The humorous answer is the Al Gore invented the Internet. He did coin the term the information superhighway in a speech he gave. Later in a CNN interview, he stated: “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.” But no, Al Gore didn’t invent the Internet.

Actually no one person invented the Internet. If you look at it history, you will find various names associated with the development of a global network that came to be called the world-wide web. But many people assume that the Internet was built by the government, especially since various politicians point to it as an example of the importance of government funding and research.

Gordon Crovitz took the time in the recent editorial to refute “the urban legend that the government launched the Internet. The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communications lines up even in a nuclear strike.”

The idea of the Internet may have started with Vannevar Bush. He was the presidential adviser during World War II who oversaw the development of radar and the Manhattan Project. He proposed that we build a “memex” through which “wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.”

In the 1960s, technologists began to connect separate physical communications into a global network. Yes, the federal government was involved, but in a modest way and it wasn’t to maintain communications during a nuclear strike. People like Vinton Cerf came along and developed the protocols necessary for the various networks to communicate with each other. In fact, many of the top researchers realized they couldn’t wait for the government to connect different networks. They did it themselves.

The true history of the Internet is not one of government planning and funding, but one of private actions and innovation.