How did the internet start as a military project?

The answer

ARPANET, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, sent its first message on October 29, 1969, from UCLA to Stanford Research Institute. The intended message was 'LOGIN,' but the system crashed after transmitting just 'LO.' The network was designed to maintain communications even if parts were destroyed in a nuclear attack, using a revolutionary concept called packet switching - breaking data into small packets that could take different routes. By 1971 ARPANET had 15 nodes, and by the 1990s it had evolved into the global internet.