3/3/08: The Science channel aired a show titled 'The History of the Internet. Woefully it was disappointing lacking any background on the true origins of the Internet and what preceded the Internet. It began with the browser wars of the 1990's
and even had that somewhat wrong. The history of the Internet began, wrongly, with the development of Mosaic and proceeded from there forward. Included were clips of Bill Gates lying to Congress about Microsoft's predatory approach to all attempts to destroy Netscape, eventually winning, although at great economic cost to MS and Personally to Mr. Gates.
While titled The History of the Internet the announcer introduced it as the beginning of the World Wide Web and as one who was there the fact is the WWW
is an offshoot of the Internet.
The history of the Internet, to be comprehensive and truthful should have begun, perhaps, with Bill Gates
hoodwinking another garage computer builder (for $50,000) into selling his version of DOS which Gates needed desperately to pitch his product to IBM. No mention was made of Gates shrewdly refusing to sell his product and rather licensing it so that to this day he collects a royalty on every Microsoft product sold.
Next in the development of the Net, however crudely was the local Bulletin Board systems that sprang up all over the country which provided games to play, a rudimentary email system known as Fido mail which operated on the "Pony Express" system. Your mail was collected in, say Bangor Maine, downloaded to the next BBS, then the next and on and on till a great portion of the country was involved. Each BBS delivering their own mail and passing the rest forward till it reached it's final destination.
For a respected TV channel like The Science Channel to overlook these early attempts to link the country electronically is a real shame. I wish them better luck if they choose to do another program similar to this. Lets hope they get it right this time.