True or false: The Internet was built by the military as a doomsday communications system designed to survive nuclear attack.

If you answered "true", then you've been keeping up with a lot of what's been written about the Net over the years. But you wouldn't be quite right. You see, the Internet has a decidedly mixed paternity - and at one time or another, several dads have claimed junior as their own.

Now Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon have come wading in to sort out this historical mess. They have written a new book, "Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet", that is a spritely chronicle of the technology that holds a fascination for so many of us. (Hafner is a contributing editor at Newsweek, owned by The Washington Post's parent company; Lyon, her husband, works for the University of Texas.)

When I first saw the book, I groused to myself that something just a quarter-century old can't be said to have a "history". But then I decided it made perfect sense in a culture that measures time in nanoseconds. Besides, reading "Wizards" turned out to be like eating a hearty meal: It stays with you long after those little snacks are forgotten.

In fact, write Hafner and Lyon, today's Internet got its start the same way so many brilliant inventions do: with frustration over a stupid problem. In this case, it was Bob Taylor's stupid problem. Taylor, an official at the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in 1966, thought it was ridiculous that his office had three separate computer terminals to connect with three university computer systems his agency funded. Each system had its own software. Hafner and Lyon compared the situation to "having a den cluttered with several television sets, each dedicated to a different channel."

"It became obvious", Taylor told the authors, "that we ought to find a way to connect all these different machines."

So he talked his boss into a million bucks to come up with a way to connect these seemingly unconnectable computers.

The work then emerged form many minds. Part of the vision behind the project came from ARPAnaut and MIT trailblazer J.C.R. Licklider, who wrote a brilliant 1960 essay in which he foresaw a time when computers would extend our brains the way other machines have extended our muscles.

"The hope," Licklider wrote, "is that in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled ... tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today."

By the late 1960s, that kind of vision was finally ripening as new technologies became practical. Researchers and engineers around the world were separately but simultaneously planning out networking technologies. The nuts and bolts of getting computers to talk with each other came from such previously unsung heroes as Paul Baran, a researcher at Rand Corp. who indeed proposed designing a nuke-proof communications network, British researcher Donald Davies and others who saw the possibilities in new technologies. The authors tell of the hard-charging crew at Cambridge, Mass.-based Bolt Beranek & Newman as they designed the first computerized "switches" to create the fledgling network.

Once the first, four-node ARPA Net came on-line and began expanding, other network experiments quickly followed - and a new problem emerged, the book details. Though computers on one network could talk to one another, many of the networks were now incompatible. The authors tell of the early-1970s effort to link the world's disparate networks. Headed up by a colorful, quotable computer scientist named Vinton Cerf, that project led to the "protocol," or software standard, that could be used to pass information "inter-network." The result: our global "Internet". By the end of 1988, the original ARPA Net was dismantled, having been supplanted by the technologies it helped bring about.

By reconstructing this history, Hafner and Lyon do us all a service - and spread credit around at last.

"The process of technological development is like building a cathedral", Baran remarked in the book. "Over the course of several hundred years new people come along and each lays down al block on top of the old foundations, each saying, 'I built a cathedral'.... If you are not careful, you can con yourself into believing that you did the most important part."

Just as important, the authors evoke a time when people tried to accomplish the impossible. "Funded entirely by ARPA, its creators given reasonably free rein, the network was evidence of a once-pervasive American trust in science." the authors wrote in wrapping up their book. "The network was built in an era when Washington provided a little guidance and a lot of faith."

Sigh. It has become fashionable these days for the leaders of both political parties to disparage government programs, as if those bumbling bureaucrats in Washington can't do anything right. We've all seen examples of the kernel of truth in that stereotype, I'm sure.

But in the case of the Internet, at least, the Pentagon put out the money, went into partnership with private business and academia, and something emerged that changed the world.