The popular, misguided jokes about Gore "inventing the Internet" come from the work he did in Congress in the 70s and 80s, and into the very early 90s, when he was one of the first politicians to embrace and push legislation for it. He was definitely influential in its adoption and proliferation, insofar as politicians are important in funding all these things, and acting as evangelists. There's a pretty good Wikipedia article[1] about it all.
Of Gore's involvement in the then-developing Internet while in Congress, Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn have also noted that,
> As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high-speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship ... the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983.
> The popular, misguided jokes about Gore "inventing the Internet" come from the work he did in Congress in the 70s and 80s
I think most people got it from this interview he did with Wolf Blitzer on CNN. At least that's how I remember it. The jokes started flowing the next day. The number of people who knew of his work on internet related legislation pales in comparison to those who heard him say this on a major TV network.
Declan McCullagh, a now largely-forgotten libertarian opinion writer, seems generally responsible for the perception that Gore's claim was hyperbolic rather than the factual statement it actually is.
Yeah the joke/meme is clearly mocking that weird comment.
The narrative that OP has fallen for is so pervasive that I think it's probably misinformation created for damage control.
It's not that it's even a particularly bad lie as far as politicians go, but it is easy to prove it wrong and easy to makes jokes about it. So I think it could easily be considered damaging enough to warrant a specific PR effort.
I wasn't all that tech savvy but I was using the internet in 1985 when I was a university student. Oh, right, it wasn't called "the internet" and we used bang addresses for email and rcp instead of scp to copy files between hosts because security was physical locks on the room with the VAX in it, but it was continuous with what is today called the internet.
I was using internet email and Usenet in 1985. I wasn't "tech savvy" - I coded, but I didn't know much about the internet or email. I got access through a UK BBS system called CIX (Compulink Information eXchange).
I first came across Usenet through my employment with Olivetti. They were selling AT&T Unix minis at the time, so we had a Usenet feed via AT&Ts office on the other side of the city. Two updates daily, I think.
[Edit] For home access to CIX, I was using a 1400-baud acoustic coupler, which I had "liberated" from the basement of a former employer. Bandwidth mattered in those days - you could DoS someone by sending them ten pages of text.
Public access starts in the late 80s with things like The World and Netcom, but people were posting on the Internet in the 1980s. There's http://olduse.net where you can go and read old USENET posts from the era.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...