Okay, we all got a good laugh out of Al Gore's insinuation that he invented the internet, but what is the truth? How did it really get started?

In 1962, J.C.R. Licklider of MIT proposed some ideas for a "Galactic Network", which was what he called a global network of computers, which we know as the internet.

As a head honcho at DARPA (the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency), he convinced the agency to implement his ideas, and in 1969, ARPANET was born. ARPANET was a military network, under the control of the Department Of Defense. The first nodes to be established in this network were at UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute, followed soon by the University of Utah. And so the internet had its beginnings.

Now, Mr. Gore was in his teens and early twenties when all this was going on, so he could hardly be called a father of the internet. But keep in mind that ARPANET was merely a military "precursor" to what we know as the internet. And in 1990, Gore introduced a bill designed to fund the creation of an "information systems highway" for education. And so we must give him some credit for that piece of legislation.