Hansard gems: The first mention of the internet
Leaving aside two typos (no, they weren’t really debating the internet in 1919 and no, those 1974 radios weren’t wireless access points ahead of their time) the first mention of the internet in Parliament was, as far as I can find, in February 1990.
It came from then Conservative MP (and later Liberal Democrat) Emma Nicholson:
According to L’Express, in a few months the hackers of Hamburg were in touch with the Red Army through a contact derived from Amsterdam—it is a very international affair. In under a year the group had accessed and gone through a number of highly protected and important networks, including those at NASA and at CERN, the nuclear research institute near Geneva on the borders of France and Switzerland. They had been through Philips of France, and, through INTERNET, they had gained access to 20,000 American and European naval and military computers.
This, by the way, puts Parliament four years ahead of the first internet cybercafe in the UK.
So what were they discussing in 1919? I’d assume a typo from ‘international’…
I think it was a typo for “interest”, as in “mortgage interest”.
I was under the impression Emma Nicholson rejoined the Conservatives in 2016.