"The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPAnet) developed by the US Department of Defense (1969) was the world's first operational packet switching network, and is considered to be "the mother" of the modern internet.In the autumn of 1969 the first ARPANET computer was connected to the ARPANET's IMP node at UCLA. Doug Engelbart's hypertext-project computer at SRI was the next. By the end of the year, the network also included the computers at the UCSB and the University of Utah, four in all. All the computers used different operating systems and they were able to talk to each other across the network with equal status. The Internet was the result of some visionary thinking by people in the early 1960s who saw great potential in allowing computers to share information on research and development in scientific and military fields. J.C.R. Licklider of MIT first proposed a global network of computers in 1962, and moved over to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in late 1962 to head the work to develop it."
Credits: http://www.dei.isep.ipp.pt/docs/arpa.html, and http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/historical.html