Love him or hate him, he helped popularize the Internet with his use of the term “Information Superhighway” on national TV. It was around the time he made this speech that the Internet took off. Gore spoke at a past TMC event and made light of the whole “Inventing the Internet” situation. This was right after he lost the presidency to Bush. The audience was surprised at how loose and relaxed he was in person as opposed to TV. Here are the details on the award he will be receiving.

As an aside, we took a lot of heat as our speaking contract with Vice President Gore said that we must refer to him as the “The Honorable Al Gore” whenever he referenced him. People subsequently assumed we were endorsing Gore. A number of “non-Gore” fans were nice enough to let us know how they felt. The most memorable response I recall receiving was that a person would only come to the speech if we supplied a bucket of rotten fruit for him to throw.

Still, we had somewhere around 1,500 people in the room to listen to Gore speak and he did an amazing job. Much better than any time I ever saw him on TV.