Vint Cerf writes a great post about how the modern-day internet (no, not Facebook and Twitter and TMZ.com) came to be during a tumultuous switchover in 1983:
Marking the birth of the modern-day Internet | Official Google Blog: “In an attempt to solve this, Robert Kahn and I developed a new computer communication protocol designed specifically to support connection among different packet-switched networks. We called it TCP, short for ‘Transmission Control Protocol,’ and in 1974 we published a paper about it in IEEE Transactions on Communications: ‘A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication.’ Later, to better handle the transmission of real-time data, including voice, we split TCP into two parts, one of which we called ‘Internet Protocol,’ or IP for short. The two protocols combined were nicknamed TCP/IP.”