Welcome to the forum digbey, if I have not said so already!
That Al Gore doc is pretty awful, given that it is dated as late as 1989. No mention of he word "internet" in it, despite the fact that the internet had been going for what eight years already and the ARPANET for much much longer than that. So it is as if he had not even heard of the term.
And such is the lack of vision, that all they can see it being used for is supercomputers, which never needed it because dialup was enough to submit jobs to run on remote supercomputers instead of your own slow local mainframe. (I remember a job that ran for ten days on the university's mainframe and really got everyone's backs up, then ran it on the Cray at Daresbury and it took about half an hour or something. And was probably cheaper too. My prof saw my ZX81 once and decided one would probably be faster than the mainframe we had because he would not have to put his punched cards through the window for the little man and then wait for the listing to come back next day; he didn't seem to know about 'modern' interactive terminals. It might or might not have been, given that I ran something once on a PET and it took ten days to run and then failed anyway because of some bug of mine.)
