LBJ - Ahead of His Time
From a speech when President Johnson signed the bill forming Public Broadcasting many decades ago.
I think we must consider new ways to build a great network for knowledge. Not just a broadcast system, but one that employs every means of sending and of storing information that the individual can use. The country doctor getting help from a distant laboratory or a teaching hospital. A scholar in Atlanta might draw instantly on a library in New York. A famous teacher could reach with ideas and inspiration into some far off classroom so that no child need be neglected. Eventually I think this electronic knowledge bank could be as valuable as the Federal Reserve Bank and such a system could involve other nations, it could involve them in a partnership to share knowledge and to thus enrich all mankind. A wild and visionary idea? Not at all. Yesterday’s strangest dreams are today’s headlines, and change is getting swifter every moment.
It wasn’t Gore who invented the internet, it was Lyndon Baines Johnson.