I seem to be repeating myself to young whippersnappers, but the web is not the same as the internet.

Here is the early history of the internet/arpanet: http://mercury.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/arpageo.html

The internet clearly predated Minitel. The big difference is that it was not initially used for commerce. It was to link the military with universities.

I joined Xerox in 1985. Two years earlier the network we were on converted from Arpanet to Internet. There might have been some group somewhere in Xerox that was still on the Arpanet but the military were worried about security so they created the Internet. You can call the exact date of the split between arpanet and internet as being the birth of the internet.

Sometime in 1980 I was also involved in hooking up the internet to my college.

Urls also predated the web because they were used on the internet.

The web made the internet easier to use - that is true. But before then we still had email and discussion boards and distribution groups. It was all text based and somewhat ugly.