Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlelady for yielding and for her work on this legislation. I'd also like to thank Chairman Smith and Chairwoman Lummis for all their work on this bill. It's been nearly 4 years since we last reauthorized and updated the NITRD program, and it's time we get this job done. The House, again, on this bill has passed legislation since that time, but we need to get this done today here and get this through the Senate and to the President's desk. The NITRD program evolved from the High Performance Computing Act of 1991, which funded the development of Mosaic--the first commercial Web browser which made the Internet user friendly and led to its explosion in the 1990s. This innovation was created by a team of programmers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. As a brief aside, I was just at the NCSA in Urbana-Champaign at the University of Illinois for the launch of the Blue Waters supercomputer, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, which is also there at the University of Illinois. But Marc Andreessen, one of the lead programmers on the original project that created Mosaic and the founder of Netscape, summed up the importance of Federal investment in this research by saying: If it had been left to private industry, it wouldn't have happened, at least, not until years later.…”