Gore, Al

Al Gore, on January 14, 1994, became the first U.S. vice president to hold a live interactive news conference on an international computer network. He gave a speech at UCLA in which he talked about the "information superhighway" as a way to describe future computers communicating over a worldwide network.

Gore became the point man in the Clinton administration's effort to build a national information highway much as his father, former Senator Albert Gore, was a principal architect of the interstate highway system a generation or more earlier. The White House took a technological leap under Gore, who as a senator was known for his eagerness to embrace technology issues that many of his colleagues were reluctant to tackle.

Al Gore went on to produce the film "An Inconvenient Truth" which won two Oscars for Best Documentary and Best Original Song, and on October 12, 2007, Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change and global warming.