Technology historian John Naughton claims it was the RAND telecom engineer Paul Baran. TCP/IP inventors Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf say they created it. Others award the honor to “As We May Think” author Vannevar Bush or to J. C. R. Licklider, the “Man-Computer Symbiosis” visionary who dreamed up the Intergalactic Computer Network. More literary types even suggest that the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, the author of stories like “The Library of Babel” and “Funes the Memorious,” about “infinite libraries and unforgetting men,”1 imagined the Internet before anyone else.Then, of course, there is Albert Arnold “Al” Gore Jr. “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet,” Gore told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in March 1999. And if I had a dollar for every bad Al-Gore-invented-the-Internet joke, I could probably afford to be Trevor Traina’s neighbor up on Billionaire Row. But, of course, Gore didn’t invent the Internet, consciously or otherwise, even though the former American vice president has personally profited so massively from what he called the “information superhighway”
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