3:00 a.m. March 11, 1999 PDT

WASHINGTON -- It's a time-honored tradition for presidential hopefuls to claim credit for other people's successes.

But Al Gore as the father of the Internet?

That's what the campaigner in chief told CNN's Wolf Blitzer during an interview Tuesday evening. Blitzer asked Gore how he was different than other presumptive Democratic challengers, such as Bill Bradley. "What do you have to bring to this that he doesn't necessarily bring to this process?"

Replied Gore: "I'll be offering my vision when my campaign begins, and it'll be comprehensive and sweeping, and I hope that it'll be compelling enough to draw people toward it.... I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years."

Then came the kicker: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."

Huh?

Preliminary discussions of how the ARPANET would be designed began in 1967, and a request for proposals went out the following year. In 1969, the Defense Department commissioned the ARPANET.

Gore was 21-years-old at the time. He wasn't even done with law school at Vanderbilt University. It would be eight more years before Gore would be elected to the US House of Representatives as a freshman Democrat with scant experience in passing legislation, let alone ambitious proposals.

By that time, file copying -- via the UUCP protocol -- was beginning. Email was flourishing. The culture of the Internet was starting to develop through the Jargon File and the SF-Lovers mailing list.

Of course, politicians weren't completely unaware of the Internet.

According to one account, when Senator Ted Kennedy learned in 1968 that Massachusetts-based BBN had won the ARPA contract for an "interface message processor," he sent a congratulatory telegram. It thanked the upstanding folks at BBN for their ecumenical spirit in devising an "interfaith message processor."

Blitzer, unfortunately, didn't appear to know any of that. After Gore took credit for the Internet, Blitzer simply moved on talk about polls showing Texas governor George W. Bush and Elizabeth Dole ahead of the vice president.

Gore has taken credit for popularizing the term "information superhighway" and around 1991 penned related articles for publications such as Byte magazine. But the term "data highway" has been used as far back as 1975, before Gore entered Congress.

In 1990, Gore introduced a bill that would allow the federal government to enter the business of crafting software for teachers to use. Another Gore plan would create a new federal research center for educational computing to support an "information systems highway."

But the system he envisioned bears little resemblance to the PC-dominated Internet.

"Supercomputers are the steam locomotives of the information age," then-Senator Gore was quoted as saying in one article published in 1990. "In the Industrial Age, steam locomotives didn't do much good until the railroad tracks were laid down across the nation. Similarly, we now have supercomputers going into the seventh generation of supercomputers, but we don't have the interstate highways that we need to connect them.

"Within four years, the top-of-the-line US$20 million supercomputers will cost less than $400,000. A few years after that, they will be in the $10,000 to $20,000 range."

But the development of the Net has resembled less a government-managed industrial project -- such as the orderly interstate-highway systems Gore hoped for -- and more an anarchic sprawl.

"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.

Since 1993, Gore has become one of the most prominent people in the Clinton administration on issues related to high technology. He hosts visiting businessmen and takes pride in personally announcing new technology initiatives such as Internet II funding.

He also took the lead in supporting the Clipper Chip and continued restrictions on the overseas shipments of encryption products.

High-visibility events can be prone to embarrassing slip-ups. At one recent White House event, Gore introduced Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers, who he had met with privately earlier that day.

Gore told the audience how much he valued Chambers and one of the products Cisco produced. But he mispronounced "routers" as root-ers.