I can’t let that pass without the necessary pedantry: the Internet long predated either contribution.

I remember a doctor describing this effect in his field in the last century. He said many conditions, particularly mental health related where all written down by French and German doctors at the turn of the century, so this friend Doctor of mine learned the original names.

But as American and British publishers started growing, they started doing a very sly thing which was, when an anglo researcher made a contribution to the understanding of that condition they would double barrel it at first. So it might have started as the Friedman psychosis, then it became the Friedman-Johns psychosis, and slowly the newer editions just had the Johns psychosis.

I wonder if Caillau is but a newer victim of this seemingly very anglophilic tradition.

The browser was a bit of an obvious invention at the time. We were cramming more and more functionality into BBS software, and rendering it into a WYSIWYG+WIMP client was a natural next step. If I'd managed to get off the couch that week, I'd be the father of "the internet". (My one was a lot more like a pdf document, though.)

> Tim Berners Lee is widely accredited as the inventor of the internet

Do you mean the web?

The Internet was already a thing before either of these people came along and built something on top of it.

The things that stands out about Tim's toy hypertext system (the "World Wide Web") was that Tim was focused on the actual system, rather than on the academic experiment. There were researchers in that area but they felt it was important to figure out problems like link decay before you would try to deploy this at scale, Tim didn't care, it worked fine.

What you've done is akin to if somebody argued that it's wrong to credit Bill Gates with inventing the computer when really that's what Steve Jobs did. It's not even the right generation. [ You can argue about whether what matters is the idea of the Analytical Engine, or one of the early realisations like the Z3, or Colossus or ENIAC or whatever. But those things were all built and (aside from the Analytical Engine) in use before Jobs or Gates were even born ]

Why the last one?

I agree that ESR and Martin are quite overrated, but why Kay? And why call out that you expect downvotes?

You think the founders of the most valuable computer companies in the world are too famous?