Tom Jennings
American programmer who wrote the Fido BBS software and, by extension, started FidoNet.
Jennings wrote Fido in San Francisco in 1984, and that same year linked his board to another in Baltimore so the two could swap messages at night when call rates were low. That grew into FidoNet: a worldwide network of hobbyists phoning each other on a schedule, with no central infrastructure beyond a shared nodelist.
He was also a prominent voice in punk and queer culture, publishing the zine Homocore in the late 1980s. That one of the largest pre-web networks was built by someone who distrusted authority is hardly a coincidence — FidoNet was in practice run by its sysops, and the flame wars reflected that.