Based on his victory speech Tuesday night, I’m curious as to when Gabriel Gomez thinks the Internet first started “existing.”
Based on a transcript I saw over at Red Mass Group, Gomez Tuesday night claimed that in 1976 (when Ed Markey started his career in public service), “the Internet did not yet exist.”
Interesting.
Like many people who have been following the tech industry for several decades, I consider “the Internet” to be a somewhat gradual evolution from ARPANET (late ’60s) to the Internet. Open-architecture “Internetting” work started in the early ’70s. ARPANET and email were demonstrated publicly in 1972.
Tech folks out there: When would you say the Internet first existed? Am I just nitpicking here? (If so, sorry, but I do love computer history.)
Maybe he thinks it’s not the Internet until, oh, it switched protocols to tcp? I think that was sometime in the early ’80s. Or, as I’m now starting to wonder, does he not know the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web?
In any case, I’m also curious as to why Gomez thinks it wise to ridicule the fact that someone has had a lengthy career. Is it really good strategy to piss off a whole bunch of voters over the age of 50 within hours of winning the nomination?
You could ask the same question about television. The first broadcasts began in the late 1920’s, but most people would answer “the 40’s.” Why is FDR associated with radio? Isn’t he considered before TV?
There are numerous technologies that existed for decades before they spread.
Techies aside (and even then it would depend on what kind of techie), I think most people date “the Internet” as post-Netscape, and I bet 99% of the general population doesn’t know the difference between the Web and the Internet. Just did a survey of the office, and no one (and all sit at screens all day, including some doing social media marketing) could explain either.
I liked Mosaic.
in my opinion if you’re seeking to represent a state where “the Internet” is an extremely important piece of the economy, and you’re potentially going to be deciding on regulations of said Internet, it would be helpful to know what you’re talking about.
was that MA politicians really knew nothing about medicine. So what are they supposed to really know about? That’s a big industry here as well.
Sadly, I’m of a generation where “the net” means usenet — for me, it originally meant “DECnet”. The idea of joining DECnet and ARPAnet was radical in its day.
I was participating in flamewars on rec.audio in 1979 (via a VT100 connected through a 300 baud dialup). I think, though I’m not sure, that at Digital (where I worked then) inter-company email was fairly widespread by then. I don’t remember whether it connected outside the company.
In my view, “the internet” first emerged as usenet and widespread email, so that text, messages and files could be readily exchanged. I was doing that years before the web. I distinctly remember when Mosaic was announced. It took a little while for that to spread (and turn into Netscape).
I guess I would date the internet, as a technology available to public, to something like 1980-85, and the web to something like 1994-1996.
I was in the last class at school to learn how to use a slide rule as 4 function calcualtors hit the stores ($175).
I learned Basic with paper tapes in HS
I learned Fortran with punch cards in college.
I remember sticking a 5.25″ DOS disk in a PS1
Doing word processing and spreadsheet in multiple programs that don’t exist anymore.
But people can exist perfectly fine today without knowing any of that stuff. Life moves forward and all that fades away and is no longer important.
I received a TRS80 for graduation from College. It had 4k. I worked for a company that sold 8″ floppy disks and “winchester” hard drives. I sold 5 meg hard drives for $3,000. I wrote applications in assembly. Those were the days. So in my opinion and as is said here often “nothing to see here folks”.
Gomez is exactly what the Republicans need right now, fiscal conservative, social liberal. Those conservatives who argue more elections would be won by moving farther to the right, are wrong. We’ll see.
You mean…. **blink**… there was something before there was… the google!?!?!
All seriousness aside, this graph is the winner:
I think if Gomez had said “the Internet as we know it” and you’d have no kick about his knowledge of history, but you’d still be right on about his strange view about lengthy careers. Gomez himself appears, despite being only 47 years old, to have had three careers: Navy pilot, Navy Seal, Investment banker. It’s great that he was a navy pilot, but according to his rules against length of service he shouldn’t have been made a pilot if the EC-2 he flew wasn’t designed before he was commissioned…. by that… logic… all military pilots should probably still be flying P-51 Mustangs and/or DC-3s since anybody who started their career before the F-16 was even a glimmer in some engineers eye couldn’t possibly be able to deal with it.
Somebody should ask him if, since he started his investment banking career in 1997 or so, if he feels obligated to deal with (and legislate over) collateral debt obligations and other such instruments that didn’t exist, or weren’t widely used, prior to his entree into the field.
the question is whether the his point about Markey’s length of service is valid.
I thought the debate was confined to whether Gomez was a dope because he didn’t know the origins of the Internet.
Didn’t Strom Thurmond and Robert Byrd put to rest the idea that there was any maximum appropriate length of service in Congress? Markey could go another 30 years or more.
… to tell that to me. Tell that to Gomez.
Is he going to say he’s more qualified? Clearly he’s not.
Some voters like the “give the new guy a chance” angle.
Others like the “time for a change.”
So he’s just trying a well worn tactic to appeal to those types.
I was only really interested in this thread to see if people thought he was stupid.
They still believe that Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet, which is crap, so Gomez needs to pick a year prior to Clinton/Gore in order to make his LIE work.
but it’s more like a Saturday Night Live quote. Lot’s of people say it.
Al Gore did say ” During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.”
He’s also been inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.
Al Gore is pretty much old news. I wouldn’t get all worked up calling it a Gomez lie. He was just making a joke. If Markey was making a speech and said “since Sarah Palin saw Russia from her house” (which is SNL, not Palin), would you be calling him a LIAR? I wouldn’t, I’d be chuckling along with everyone else.
The following was from Gabriel Gomez’s speech on Tuesday.
He is a Liar. You serious think he is thinks the national debt is just a big joke? I saw the speech live of TV and he wasn’t making a joke, he was presenting this Lie within a list of his core issues! And Republicans are to F’n Stupid to know the difference. Hence my original postulate, “Republicans are to Stupid None Information Voters” who vote for Liars.
I believe you. I don’t like the way he looks anyway.
and thank you for not pointing out the grammar issue “Republicans are to Stupid…”, should be “too Stupid”. I kept changing the wording and previewing and got lost in the edits. D’oh.
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-07-21/news/30100938_1_massage-therapists-sexual-assault-al-gore
And Republicans being stupid Low to None Information Voters how?
I don’t see the connection.
Squirrel!
…and yes, that basically means the world wide web, though I remember when AOL keywords were at least as common as standard URLs and I also recall something called Prodigy that was marketed as having functions we now associate with the internet.
Is the sound of DFW not complaining about a Republican outsourcing jobs in the present, the only outsourcing that was bad was a vote Markey made 25 years ago.
given what happened in West Virginia. The Republicans (Part of Child Murderers) have blood on their hands as usual.
I also wonder whether jconway meant his reply to be to a comment I made on another thread refering to trade votes.
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/05/03/18014902-guns-made-for-kids-how-young-is-too-young-to-shoot
The brand of the product isn’t something that stuck. I was wracking my brain about a tragedy at a cricket game or imagining an attack by a swarm of crickets and was coming up empty.
in my head can sometimes be crippling. When I first heard the “Cricket” story, I went through the whole:
1) Pinocchio
2) Jiminy Cricket
3) Otis Campbell (the town drunk on Andy Griffith).
4) Judy Garland saying, “Jiminy Crickets” in the Wizard of Oz (I believe it is when the Wicked Witch of the West first appears.)
5) A science project report I did on crickets in Grammer School.
6) A character named Crickett on “The Young and Restless” and how that connects to “The Nanny”.
I got an entire sicko “Cricket” file in my head. Someday, perhaps I will be lucky enough to be on Jeopardy.
we’ll root for you and hope there’s a Crickets category.
BTW, the original Jeopardy predates Markey — 1964 — but I don’t imagine Gomez is that big a fan.
What are things that predate Markey? Wouldn’t it be cool to get ads like the “I am Stephen Lynch” that say, “I predate Markey”.
For example, I was born in 1959, “I predate Markey”. I am Spartacus!
…so not only do I predate Markey, I predate mike_cote!
yes, you too are wicked old, but do you know who Glen Coco is?
Unfortunately, I can only vote on your comment once.
I had to google “Glen Coco.” Since the ability to to talk like the hip kids left me decades ago, I don’t even try any more It’s strangely liberating.
I was referring to the initial post in this thread about Gomez, but I am sure it would be germane there as well.