An item from UCLA's school newspaper from 1969 reporting that "A computer facility here will become the first station in a nation-wide network which, for the first time, will link together computers of different makes and using different machine languages."
Wikipedia page about the History of the Internet that I showed in class. Note that the first Internet connection (really, the first ARPANET connection) was made between UCLA and Stanford -- most early work on the Internet was done at universities and was funded by government grants. It was only after the launch of the Web in the early 90s that businesses began devoting resources to the Internet and the Web.