Dave Hughes (the wireless pioneer), has this to say about the ongoing story of the Al Gore quote:

 On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, Curt Priest wrote:
 
 > http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/18390.html
 > 
 >                      NO CREDIT WHERE IT'S DUE
 >                      3:00 a.m. Vice President Gore tells a
 >                      reporter the Internet was his idea. Nice
 >                      try, Al. Declan McCullagh reports from
 >                      Washington.
 > 
 
 Well, let me tell you and Declan McCullagh that Gore had a hell of a lot
 more to do, as a Senator, with kickstarting the Internet in 1990 91
 than his cynical article states or implies. I know. I was quite on top
 of things, with his chief technology assistant Mike Nelson. Gore had to
 battle the damned Republican Senators for TWO YEARS to get the NSFnet
 funding throuhg.
 
 And this quote Delcan runs:
 
                      Gore played no positive role in the
                       decisions that led to the creation of the
                       Internet as it now exists -- that is, in the
                       opening of the Internet to commercial
                       traffic," said Steve Allen, vice president for
                       communications at the conservative
                       Progress and Freedom Foundation. 
 
 That is absolute horsehockey. It was Gore, first as a Senator who got the
 funding for the NSFNet through Congress after the backwards Republicans
 defeated it the first year. And it was the NSFnet which, when he was in
 the White House, and IBM snuck in the backdoor with Al Weis leading them
 who got the NSF to do a Cooperative Agreement with a new entity called
 ANS, which was the FIRST sale of Internet bandwith to private companies,
 and led the way for UUNET, PSI, Sprint and others. Which THEN evolved to
 the total privitization of the net when the Coop Agreement ended.
 
 The Republicans are trying to discredit Gore (running for Prez) so THEY
 can somehow take credit where NO CREDIT IS DUE, and stick a Repub in the
 White House who will deliver the ENTIRE Internet into the hands of the
 biggest pacmoney paying Corporations they can, and tell the schools, the
 small towns, and the high-cost areas of the country to just wait for the
 Forever Trickle Down, or ala Marie Antonette "Let em eat cake."
 
 Bah, humbug. I would take a technology-oriented Gore in the White House
 before ANY of the ossified Republican Candidates. 
 
 And Declan is in this article a Shill for the Republican Presidential
 Party Politics. Name me a SINGLE Republican Congressman who was delivering
 speeches on the floor of the Senate about connecting up "The little girl
 in Tennessee to the Library of Congress in 1990"!!! Not a damned one.  If
 it had been left to the Republicans we would NOT have an "Internet as we
 know it" at all! 
 
 And for Declan to try and equate the absolutely dull term 'data highway'
 in 1975 with Gore's "Information Highway' in 1990, which caught the
 country's attention and imagination, is half assed journalism.
 
 Who'se Republican Speech Writer are you Declan?