computers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#Creation_of_the_Internet

While Tim Berners-Lee rightfully deserves the title of "Father of the World Wide Web", first came The Internet, and what became The Internet arguably grew out of "The Blizzard of '78" and what it inspired Ward Christensen, Randy Seuss, and Bill Hayes to do ... more than a decade before Tim came up with the "WWW".

I read somewhere that the old saw about ARPANet being the foundation of the internet is actually a crock. Can't remember where I read it though.

Some guy in the UK took his research on packet switching to the US and the first connection between two networks happened around 1967. Some military guy from Defense Research Projects said that what they did was not a connection between multiple networks, it was just one network, and so it couldn't be considered the 'internet'.