Todd’s Brief History of the Interweb: Al Gore will tell you I’m a liar.

You wake up in the morning. Your automatic coffee machine has your java already for you. Ten years ago this is the part of the morning routine where you might go get the paper, and check the mail. Now you sit at the family computer and get your news and your mail digitally. We all enjoy the ease of life the Internet grants us, but how did it get started?
It all really started in 1958 with DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). DARPA, sometimes known as ARPA was a defense department agency created to help America re-establish technological superiority over the USSR.
J.C.R. Licklider, of MIT developed a theory that computers could be networked and two computers could exchange information over said network. His vision was surprisingly much like the Internet of today, a huge system of interconnected computers that could all access the same information from the same places. He told his friends at DARPA, especially one Mr. Lawrence Roberts, about this theory and the team ran with it.
Leonard Kleinrock, also of MIT agreed with Licklider’s theory, but rather than transfer information over this hypothetical network using circuits, he proposed information was packaged in “packets.” He convinced Roberts and several other colleagues at DARPA that this was the way to go.
In 1965 Roberts, in Massachusetts, and a professor at UCLA sent the first packet of information. From there, Roberts came up with the plan for what he called the ARPANET.
In 1969 after four years of hard work, calculating the geography and logistics, the ARPANET had four host terminals set up. The dreams of so many were coming true, and what we now know as the Internet was well on the way to being the Internet of today.
In 1972 the International Computer Communication Conference was held. This conference was vastly important to the future of the internet. The conference was the first time the public had a chance to see the ARPANET in action. The expo also was the birthplace of Electronic Mail, now known as E-mail.
E-mail was the brainchild of Ray Tomlinson at BBN, who wrote the first basic programming to read and send E-mail. From there, Roberts improved the application, simplifying and expanding on Tomlinson’s initial program.
Tomlinson came up with the idea because people all over the world were helping to contribute to the growth and accessibility of the Internet. Tomlinson saw this application as a way for all of the developers and users to communicate with one another.
Many people confuse the Internet and the World Wide Web. The Internet is simply the network. The web is all of the content that can be accessed using the Internet.
The Internet is relatively young, but has changed so much, and changed the way we live.

Sources:
Wikipedia.org - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet
Internet Society (History Page) - http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml