| For the record, it should be noted that Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn's 1973 paper A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication was the first to describe an effective method for communication between disparate networks.
They had hit upon the idea of enclosing packets in "datagrams" that contain addressing information. "Gateway" machines between networks would only need to understand the addressing information in the wrappers, not the packets themselves, to route them to their destinations. They called their new protocol Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP.
Cerf, who went on to become the program director of the Arpa Internet project in 1976, is quoted in J. Abate's Inventing the Internet:
"We were just rank amateurs, and we were expecting that some authority would finally come along and say, 'Here's how we are going to do it.' And nobody ever came along."
Until Al Gore, I suppose. | 
