It might be better to say that the Department of defense funded the development of the Internet, rather than started it. It was largely an academic exercise. Note that the RAND stdy in 1964, which is often referenced , was about voice communications, not data communications. I will grant you that the DoD did influence the development, by directing funding (1976). A very abbreviated history of the internet follows. References at the bottom.

1957: United States forms the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Department of Defense (DoD) to establish US lead in science and technology applicable to the military

1962: First description of the social interactions that could be enabled through networking was a series of memos by J.C.R. Licklider of MIT discussing his "Galactic Network" concept. He envisioned a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site. In spirit, the concept was very much like the Internet of today. J.C.R. Licklider & W. Clark, "On-Line Man Computer Communication", August 1962.

Licklider was the first head of the computer research program at DARPA, starting in October 1962. While at DARPA he convinced his successors at DARPA, Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor, and MIT researcher Lawrence G. Roberts, of the importance of this networking concept.

1964: Paul Baran, of the RAND Corporation (a government agency), was commissioned by the U.S. Air Force to do a study on how it could maintain its command and control over its missiles and bombers, after a nuclear attack. P. Baran, "On Distributed Communications Networks", IEEE Trans. Comm. Systems, March 1964

1967: In late 1966 Roberts went to DARPA to develop the computer network concept and assembled his plan for the "ARPANET", publishing it in 1967. At the conference where he presented the paper, there was also a paper on a packet network concept from the UK by Donald Davies and Roger Scantlebury of NPL

1968: ARPA awarded the ARPANET contract. The physical network was constructed in 1969, linking four nodes: University of California at Los Angeles, SRI (in Stanford), University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of Utah.

1972: In March Ray Tomlinson at BBN, a private firm in Cambridge, Mass, wrote the basic email message send and read software, motivated by the need of the ARPANET developers for an easy coordination mechanism. In July, Roberts expanded its utility by writing the first email utility program to list, selectively read, file, forward, and respond to messages. From there email took off as the largest network application for over a decade. This was a harbinger of the kind of activity we see on the World Wide Web today, namely, the enormous growth of all kinds of "people-to-people" traffic. Pixies Place is an excellent example of this.

1973: Development began on the protocol later to be called TCP/IP, it was developed by a group headed by Vinton Cerf from Stanford and Bob Kahn from DARPA. This new protocol was to allow diverse computer networks to interconnect and communicate with each other.

1974: First Use of term Internet by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in paper on Transmission Control Protocol V. G. Cerf and R. E. Kahn, "A protocol for packet network interconnection", IEEE Trans. Comm. Tech., vol. COM-22, V 5, pp. 627-641, May 1974.

1976: The Department of Defense began to experiment with the TCP/IP protocol and decided to require it for use on ARPANET.

1981: Vinton Cerf proposed a plan for an inter-network connection between CSNET and the ARPANET.

1983: Every machine connected to ARPANET had to use TCP/IP

1984: The ARPANET was divided into two networks: MILNET and ARPANET. MILNET was to serve the needs of the military and ARPANET to support the advanced research component, Department of Defense continued to support both networks.

1990: Department of Defense disbanded the ARPANET and it was replaced by the NSFNET backbone. The original 50Kbs lines of ARPANET were taken out of service.

Tim Berners-Lee and CERN in Geneva implements a hypertext system to provide efficient information access to the members of the international high-energy physics community. From whence comes the World Wide Web.

http://www.isoc.org/internet/histor...f.shtml#Origins

http://www.davesite.com/webstation/net-history.shtml

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Eudaimonia