How did they start?
What I mean is which government agency was resposable for coming up with the idea? Why did it get released to the public and the rest of the world? And did Al Gore have anything to do with it?
Just being very curious as I work as a web site designer but hardly know much about the beginnings of such a wonderful tool I use every day.
The Internet started as a project called ARPAnet. It was sponsored within the US Department of Defense to create a computer network that was not easily taken out in a military conflict.
A “packet switching” network was deemed to the easiest to de-centralize.
Later the US National Science Foundation developed NSFnet for non-military purposes, esp research and education. NSFnet became the core of what we now call the Internet.
The word “internet” starts to appear in the early 80’s with the develpment of the networking protocols IP “internet protocol” and TCP “transmission control protocol”.
Al Gore did not invent the web, nor did he ever say so.
Schnitte, that another one of the Snopes Inconsistancies. They say “False”, yet if you had not seen that at the top, and just read the body of the text, you have thought “True”, or at least “Sort of”.
(not arguing over whether or not it’s true, but pointing out that the Snopes cite does have an inconsistancy in it, IMO)
There’s some point in what you say, Anthracite, yet I am fairly confident that the sentence “I took the initiative in creating the Internet” can - albeit pretty arrogant - hardly be interpreted as claiming to have invented the thing. Gore’s alleged “I invented the internet” statement seems to have spread quite a lot, and I’ve read it here on the Boards repeatedly, but IMHO claiming he claimed this is manipulating the facts.
Snopes is inconsistent at times, but there are worse cases than this. Maybe they should have categorized it as “Sort of”, to make the thing clearer.
This is another internet-related myth. Although it is true that the creators designed the to network survive even if nodes were destroyed, the primary purpose of the project was to create a network for sharing scarce and expensive computer resources and for the exchange of research data.
Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon is an excellent history of the ARPANET project. They interviewed many of the people who were directly involved in the R&D. It is the most authoritative account I have ever read.
Well, okay. I’ll buy that. Mebbe they just played up the military conflict piece of the project to keep their DoD superiors interested. 
Certainly that piece of it is often played up in descriptions, even in a History Channel special I watched on the early days of the ARPAnet. Perhaps that is because it is attention-getting.