Former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz is wrong about many things, and one of those is where the Internet came from (link):

It's an urban legend that the government launched the Internet. The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communications lines up even in a nuclear strike. The truth is a more interesting story about how innovation happens - and about how hard it is to build successful technology companies even once the government gets out of the way... ...by the 1960s technologists were trying to connect separate physical communications networks into one global network - a "world-wide web." The federal government was involved, modestly, via the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network... But full credit goes to the company where [Robert Taylor, who ran the ARPA program in the 1960s] worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox. It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks. Researchers there also developed the first personal computer (the Xerox Alto) and the graphical user interface that still drives computer usage today... According to a book about Xerox PARC, "Dealers of Lightning" (by Michael Hiltzik), its top researchers realized they couldn't wait for the government to connect different networks, so would have to do it themselves. "We have a more immediate problem than they do," Robert Metcalfe told his colleague John Shoch in 1973. "We have more networks than they do." Mr. Shoch later recalled that ARPA staffers "were working under government funding and university contracts. They had contract administrators . . . and all that slow, lugubrious behavior to contend with."

Whether that's accurate or not, Crovitz' history ignores the 500,000 pound elephant in the room: the massive government funding of companies in Silicon Valley by the Department of Defense and other agencies. Without that, this post probably wouldn't exist and you probably wouldn't be reading this on your own computer over the Internet.

From this:

From the beginnings of the computer industry, federal and military agencies promoted vital basic research into computing hardware and deployed early computers throughout the government. As economist Vernon Ruttan writes, "The role of the military in driving the development of computer, semiconductor and software technologies cannot be overemphasized. These technologies were, until well into the 1960s, nourished by markets that were almost completely dependent on the defense, energy and space industries." In fact, the ENIAC, the first electronic computer, was built in 1945 to crunch numbers for the Army Ballistics Research Laboratory. In the 1950s, the Army Signal Corps funded research into semiconductors, and weapons labs at the Atomic Energy Commission were the first purchasers of supercomputers, the ancestors of today's desktop PCs. NASA, the Department of Defense, the National Center for Atmosphere Research, and the U.S. Weather Bureau commissioned their own supercomputers soon after. Perhaps most importantly, the Air Force's SAGE air defense project generated numerous innovations in computing design and production during the early 1950s, including cheap manufacturing of computer memory, communication between computers, and the use of keyboard terminals.

And, from this:

...Self-made millionaires, people who started great companies in garages and dorm rooms, people who’ve read Atlas Shrugged 10 times—your classic successful entrepreneur—tend to think of government spending as only capable of throttling innovation and entrepreneurship, not encouraging them.

The only problem is, that point of view is hard to reconcile with the history of Silicon Valley. The entity that built the Valley and gave birth to its culture of collaboration and experimentation was none other than Uncle Sam. In other words, the creation of the hub of American entrepreneurship and innovation was a federal project.

My source is entrepreneur and Stanford prof Steve Blank, as well as the multi-part blog he wrote a couple years ago, which he calls the Secret History of Silicon Valley. In a recent conversation with me, Blank exclaimed that hard-core libertarians, particularly those from the Valley, believed in a Valley creation myth in which the semi-conductor fabs sprang from orchards in one rapid evolutionary swoop. In fact, he says, before there was was Silicon Valley, there was Microwave Valley, which specialized in electronic intelligence—spying on Soviets air defenses, basically—and the seed capital for it came exclusively from the CIA and military. Private capital arrived much later.

At one point, says Blank, the institutions of the Valley were so totally in the pocket of the Department of Defense that Stanford became essentially a research lab for the CIA. A number of engineering Ph. D. theses were actually classified. The largest employer at the time—and still the third largest for-profit employer in the valley is not Google, and certainly not Facebook. It’s Lockheed Martin.

UPDATE: Michael Hiltzik - a key source in Crovitz' piece - weighs in (link):

And while I'm gratified in a sense that [Crovitz] cites my book about Xerox PARC, "Dealers of Lightning," to support his case, it's my duty to point out that he's wrong. My book bolsters, not contradicts, the argument that the Internet had its roots in the ARPANet, a government project. So let's look at where Crovitz goes awry.

First, he quotes Robert Taylor, who funded the ARPANet as a top official at the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, as stating, "The Arpanet was not an Internet. An Internet is a connection between two or more computer networks." (Taylor eventually moved to Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, where he oversaw the invention of the personal computer, and continued promoting research into networking.)

But Crovitz confuses AN internet with THE Internet. Taylor was citing a technical definition of "internet" in his statement. But I know Bob Taylor, Bob Taylor is a friend of mine, and I think I can say without fear of contradiction that he fully endorses the idea as a point of personal pride that the government-funded ARPANet was very much the precursor of the Internet as we know it today. Nor was ARPA's support "modest," as Crovitz contends. It was full-throated and total. Bob Taylor was the single most important figure in the history of the Internet, and he holds that stature because of his government role.