Who actually invented the internet?

The internet is infrastructure built incrementally by many people over decades. Its ancestor, ARPANET, was funded by the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency and sent its first message between UCLA and Stanford in 1969. Packet switching, the underlying concept of breaking data into pieces routed independently, was developed independently by Paul Baran in the United States and Donald Davies in Britain. Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn designed TCP/IP, the protocol suite that allowed separate networks to interconnect, in the 1970s, and its adoption in 1983 is a reasonable birthdate for the internet as a network of networks.

The most common conflation is with the World Wide Web, which Tim Berners-Lee invented at CERN in 1989 along with HTTP, HTML, and the first browser. The web is an application running on the internet, one among many including email, which predates it substantially. Two corrections to popular versions of this story. The internet was not built to survive nuclear war, a claim its designers have repeatedly disputed; Baran's separate work on survivable communications is the source of the confusion, while ARPANET's actual purpose was resource sharing among expensive research computers. And the Al Gore joke misrepresents what he said, which was that he took the initiative in creating the internet, a claim about legislative funding that Cerf and Kahn publicly defended as fair.