ACTUALLY, in 1961, Leonard Kleinrock of MIT invented the concept of wide area networks in his paper "Information Flow In Large Communication Nets" (1).
After that, in 1964, a RAND employee by the name of Paul Baran wrote a paper entitled "On Distributed Communications Networks"(2), furthering the concepts outlined by Kleinrock.
It wasn't until AFTER Lawrence Roberts, also of MIT, wrote "Towards a Cooperative Network of Time-Shared Computers", that ARPA funded research on the idea.
FINALLY, it was National Physical Laboratory in England that created the first wide-area packet switching network in 1967.
So, NO, the government didn't INVENT the Internet. They built a closed, packet switching network that the public could not access, based on principles and ideas generated at a smattering of schools and PRIVATE COMPANIES.
After that, in 1964, a RAND employee by the name of Paul Baran wrote a paper entitled "On Distributed Communications Networks"(2), furthering the concepts outlined by Kleinrock.
It wasn't until AFTER Lawrence Roberts, also of MIT, wrote "Towards a Cooperative Network of Time-Shared Computers", that ARPA funded research on the idea.
FINALLY, it was National Physical Laboratory in England that created the first wide-area packet switching network in 1967.
So, NO, the government didn't INVENT the Internet. They built a closed, packet switching network that the public could not access, based on principles and ideas generated at a smattering of schools and PRIVATE COMPANIES.
(1) http://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/LK/Bib/REPORT/PhD/ (2) http://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.html