ARPANET was basically military and educational, and was pre-web. I remember using a 300 baud acoustic coupler to dial into a university computer c.1980; there r

ARPANET was basically military and educational, and was pre-web. I remember using a 300 baud acoustic coupler to dial into a university computer c.1980; there really wasn't a whole lot you could do with it back then - just simple text-based stuff like telnet (remote login) and command-line based e-mail (SMTP) as well as FTP. Even things like IRC, Usenet, Archie, Gopher all came later. While the commercial internet, allowing companies and consumers to connect, grew out of ARPANET, it obviously was commercially funded, with backbones built out by the telecoms, etc. I think for most people today the term "internet" is essentially synonymous with "web" - stuff they can do in their browser, which of course came a lot later. HTML and HTTP were only invented c.1990, and this was the beginning of the internet as people today know it. Even then, a lot of people only saw the internet as filtered through AOL.