Actually as far as the Internet was concerned, Berners-Lee was a Johnny-come-lately. He introduced http in 1990 and URLs in 1994.

The Internet's pre-cursor, later named the Internet, was ARPAnet, which was a pure research project based around 3 American Universities and funded from the Pentagon. It started life as long ago as 1966 when the ideas of "packet switching" were beginning to surface.

It was a little later that the military saw it as a "ggod thing" and DARPAnet was born. Meanwhile, we in Europe were messing around with X.25.

And the rest, as they say, is history.