Jim Ellis
The other Duke graduate student behind Usenet, who in 1979 wanted to give Unix people without a defence contract something to talk over.
Ellis and Tom Truscott had Unix machines at Duke University, modems, and no chance of getting onto ARPANET. The idea was to let the machines call each other over UUCP and exchange posts in topic groups. Steve Bellovin at UNC wrote the first scripts, and in January 1980 the group presented the system at the Usenix conference, where the expectation was that the network would carry a couple of articles a day.
Ellis never laid claim to any of it. Usenet was allowed to grow with no owner and no fees, which was both its strength and the reason it eventually drowned in spam. Later in his career he worked in computer security. He died in 2001, by which time Usenet had already gone from novelty to archive.