ok, Ive gone through this timeline:

http://www.internetvalley.com/archives/mirrors/davemarsh-timeline-1.htm
and marked which country invented what.



1836
-- Telegraph. England



1858-1866
-- Transatlantic cable.  Made By Germany, Funded By America

1876
-- Telephone. England

1957
-- USSR launches Sputnik,  I haven't googled this, but Im guessing Russia

1962 - 1968
-- Packet-switching (PS) networks developed  America


1969
-- Birth of Internet  America

1972
-- Computers can connect more freely and easily
First public demonstration of ARPANET between 40 machines. America


1973
-- Global Networking becomes a reality
First international connections to the ARPANET:  England and Norway


1974
-- Packets become mode of transfer
Transmission Control Program (TCP) specified. America






so...who invented it?  clearly, beyond reasonable doubt:

  America pwns it you foreign bastards.

Ah, but you stopped before HTML, and WWW, and the first Browser (Mosaic, at CERN, I believe).

Sure, TCP/IP is the underlying tech for all of this, but it's that wonderful HTML and name-space registry that opened the Web to everybody.

Not that I know who to assign credit to for that, but that's where Europe claims their fame.

>> 1876
-- Telephone. England

You sure about that?

If you're referring to Bell, he was originally a Scot, who had emigrated to Canada by the time of his invention ...

If I remember my post correctly, I believe we're now all supposed to mock you for being a sad anal bastard. 

You poor sad anal bastard...consider yourself mocked.

"You sure about that? "

nah.  I just saw he was born in Edinburgh and assumed that Scotland was English owned at that point.


Ill happily concede the invention to Canada.

So basically America was the fluffer and got the internet all good and ready, and then England came along and made it spooge out the WWW?

Allan, you just go tell all the pendantic types who whine about stuff like "Why does America call it the 'World Series'" and tell them the web is the *real* internet.

Let me know how that goes.

[btw, we invented usenet and email, too]

Philo

"...Scotland was English owned..." - if you ever visit Scotland never, ever say this. Unless you actually want a punch up.

It's right up there with muppet's Wales being part of England cock-up.

"Ah, but you stopped before HTML, and WWW, and the first Browser (Mosaic, at CERN, I believe). "

That would be correct if it wasn't 100% totally wrong:

"Netscape Navigator was the name of Netscape's web browser from versions 1.0–3.04. The first beta release versions of the browser were released in 1994 and known as Mosaic and then Mosaic Netscape until a legal challenge from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (makers of NCSA Mosaic, which many of Netscape's founders used to develop) led to the name change to Netscape Navigator. The company's name also changed from Mosaic Communications Corporation to Netscape Communications Company."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape

"The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is one of the five original centers in the National Science Foundation's Supercomputer Centers Program and a unit of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Work began in January 1986."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_for_Supercomputing_Applications


I was there right around the Netscape IPO and the school was kicking itself... they had opted for getting cash up front as opposed to stock.

The rest of timeline (linked above) mentions that - although not in so much detail.

Bit of a sterile argument really.  The vast majority of the underlying tech was invented in America by Americans. Some key bits weren't. The pillock who started it was wrong.

Ho hum...

"if you ever visit Scotland never, ever say this. Unless you actually want a punch up. "

heh.  Actually I chose those words carefully :)

...just wondering if we had any patriotic scottish posters...

Well apart from a Scottish great-grandmother...no ;-)

> 1836 -- Telegraph. England

So what you're saying is that Britain invented electronic dots and dashes, aka electronically transmitted binary messages. Britain invented the intuhnet. QED.

Forget about Tim Berners-Lee?

"With a background of system design in real-time communications and text processing software development, in 1989 he invented the World Wide Web, an internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing. while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. He wrote the first web client (browser-editor) and server in 1990."

Read the timeline in full.  It places the invention of internet at the point at which TCP/IP was defined for ARPANET.  Everything else has its relevence explained.

That was a reply to this one.

"Ah, but you stopped before HTML, and WWW, and the first Browser (Mosaic, at CERN, I believe). "

That would be correct if it wasn't 100% totally wrong:

"Netscape Navigator was the name of Netscape's web browser from versions 1.0â??3.04. The first beta release versions of the browser were released in 1994 and known as Mosaic and then Mosaic Netscape until a legal challenge from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (makers of NCSA Mosaic, which many of Netscape's founders used to develop) led to the name change to Netscape Navigator.

The first web browser is documented at http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html