The Internet and WWW are two different things often misunderstood. The Internet is a collection of networked devices using a common protocol (i.e. TCP/IP) over a wide global area. WWW or World Wide Web utilizes a single protocol called HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) that runs across TCP/IP using the common port 80 on a web server that transmits to a Browser HTML code. This is one protocol of hundreds that use the internet.
HTTP was developed by Tim Berners-Lee so he could format the plain text coming from a legacy system. This single protocol coupled with the ability for business to be able use the internet (which was limited only to Universities) made the Internet usage explode.
The internet is often thought of as your web browsers, but that is just one application that uses the internet. Others are FTP port 21, Email (SMTP port 25 / POP3 port 110), NNTP 119/433 (these newsgroups) and Telnet port 23 are a few. One old protocol no longer used is Gopher, which was a text menuing systems that allows different system to connected and was the old way of browsing. The University of Minnesota used to the mother gopher where most people began their browser via text. These are just a few examples.
Links:
Inventor of WWW:
http://www.w3.org/People/all#timbl
Web History:
http://www.w3.org/History.html
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