Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the Tech Mem Ride Home. I'm Brian McCullough.

As I said on Friday, this is the time that I did a whole deep dive into the whole controversy surrounding Al Gore saying he invented the internet.

Bet you think you know this story, at least as a punchline but did he actually say that and in fact the

whole truth surrounding Al Gore's role in the early internet is a lot more

interesting than you might think. Please enjoy.

I think it's something that we all just sort of know, the idea that Al Gore claimed he invented the internet.

I remember it being a small political issue at the

time of the 2000 election, but I honestly never cared enough to investigate the

details. Last weekend however I went down a bit of a research rabbit hole,

and so I decided to find out the truth,

not because I'm a huge fan of Al Gore or because I'm looking to score points against him either.

I was just genuinely interested and I wanted to find out the historical truth, not the

partisan-tinged conventional wisdom truth.

And so this episode is about what I found out.

As I've mentioned in a previous episode of this podcast, when the Clinton Gore ticket was first elected back in 1992,

one of their big platform initiatives was the use of computers and digital technology to create new jobs

and new industries that would help the country innovate its way out of the

sharp recession it was experiencing at the time. Gore was very much put forth as the

frontman for this new geek-based economy push. In fact, just a few short days after the election of November

1992, the New York Times ran an article with the title,

Clinton to promote high technology with Gore in charge.

The article stated that the administration wanted the government to finance research,

...