Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf can recognize Al Gore's contribution to the creation of the Internet but you cannot? Without government involvement and investment, the global communications network might have started and ended at AOL.

It's easy now to forget what the internet was like even 20 years ago when things were just ramping up. There were huge government initiatives all around the world that made it viable for commercial ventures to use it.

HAHAHAHA AOL made the internet‽ AOL is the quintessential example of the closed, proprietary network that is not the internet until other forces made that change and then AOL disappeared.

While I understand what you are saying, please try to understand what I'm saying...which might be difficult because you probably didn't live through this era.

AOL was responsible for getting more Americans online than any other company. There wasn't a mailbox in the US that didn't get an AOL installation CD at least 2 times a year.

These weren't people "switching" providers, these were people thinking "what is this crap and why do I need it?". There was a day when no one knew why they should even go online and AOL sold them on the idea. So, while what you say is true, you don't seem to understand the context of the time.

Maybe you can think of it as the iphone of smart phones or the facebook of social networks. Closed systems typically make things easier for the masses to adopt.

God do I feel old now.

The "Internet" as we know it was just a tiny corner of what AOL offered. And wasn't even originally part of the package. The Internet itself developed separately from AOL and eventually people wanted it more than they wanted anything AOL was offering. I'm not saying you don't have a valid point, about AOL bringing lots people online, but AOL had very little to do with the development of Internet.

I was born in 1980, and I used AOL for several years before I understood what the internet was. So much for your speculations about me.