Who invented the internet?

So my eight year old son asks me "Dad, who invented the internet?" while trying to figure out how to get to the college basketball website he liked where it showed current standings (Duke lost).

I am reminded of my eighth grade science partner back in 1975, who I will call "Tom", cuz that's his name, and how we had spent a couple weeks writing computer "code" to add two prime numbers together to come up with a third prime number (2+3=5). We would have time at the "media lab" where we would dial in with our written code, and somehow have this printout of the results. Totally cumbersome.

So we're just standing there, all these kids in our class around us, and Tom starts talking about it.

"Pete, this is so cool to be able to dial in like this." he says.

I say nothing.

"Isn't it?" he asks.

"Yeah, really cool" I say, "We just spent two weeks writing some computer language to add two numbers. And they equal five, we found out. After two weeks."

"No but Pete," he says, eyes bulging, getting excited, "Do you understand what this could mean? I mean, we're dialing into Honeywell, and its computer is sharing time with us...think of how many people at other schools its doing this with. Its like someday we could all be connected by computers, and be intermingling in a sort of a....web...if you will, and we'd look at stuff...we could maybe share ideas about stuff, maybe even send letters and look at photos and movies......." he trailed off, seemingly thinking of the possibilities.

I gave him a blank look, then....

"HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA"  (ie LMAO)

All the kids in the media lab were laughing at him, and he sort of went back to feeding our datacards into the thing that read our whatever.

Tom, according to Facebook, now has a job at some company, mid level management probably. He didn't respond to my friend request.

So I looked over at my son and said "Tom invented the internet."

"Who's Tom?" he asked.

I told him I was really busy reading my email and didn't have time to answer any more questions about the internet.