Mark McCahill
Led the University of Minnesota team that built Gopher in 1991, the year before the web took off.
McCahill worked at the university's microcomputer center, where the group had already written the POPmail email client for the Macintosh. The 1991 brief was a campus-wide information system, and a committee wanted something large and heavyweight. The team — Farhad Anklesaria, Paul Lindner, Daniel Torrey and Bob Alberti among them — built something small instead: a protocol in which the server sends menus and the client displays them. You could write a server in an afternoon, which is precisely why it spread.
Within two years there were thousands of Gopher servers, with the search tools Veronica and Jughead layered on top. The university's later decision to charge licence fees isn't McCahill's legacy, but it decided how the story ended. He went on to work on virtual worlds at Duke University.