A partial list of some of the myriads who should be mentioned are listed below in chronological order with at least one of their contributions (I did not include the more recent applications that are so popular on the Internet):

1961 / Leonard Kleinrock / For developing the basic principles of packet switching
1962 / J.C.R. Licklider / For his visionary expression of a Galactic Network
1962 / Paul Baran / For describing an architecture for packet networks
1964 / Ivan Sutherland / For recommending a 3-node network at UCLA
1965 / Larry Roberts / For leading the team that designed and developed the ARPANET
1965 / Thomas Marill / For achieving the first long distant dial-up connection between two computers (with Roberts)
1966 / Robert Taylor / For his visionary leadership in initiating the ARPANET project
1966 / Donald Davies / For his early UK packet network plan
1967 / Charles Herzfeld / For releasing $1 million of government funds to launch the ARPANET
1967 / Wes Clark / For suggesting the use of a dedicated network switch
1969 / Steve Crocker / For developing the NCP and author of the first RFC
1969 / Frank Heart / For serving as project manager of the BBN team that designed and built theIMP
1969 / BBN Team: / Willy Crowther, Bob Kahn, Dave Walden, Bernie Cosell, Hawley Rising, Severo Ornstein, Ben Barker, Marty Thrope, et al.
1969 / UCLA Team: / Steve Crocker, Vint Cerf, Jon Postel, Mike Wingfield, Charley Kline, Bill Naylor, et al.
1969 / Howard Frank / For his network topology design of the early ARPANET
1970 / Norm Abramson / For developing ALOHANET
1972 / Ray Tomlinson / For the introduction of email to the Internet
1973 / Bob Kahn / For co-inventing the TCP/IP protocol
1973 / Vint Cerf / For co-inventing the TCP/IP protocol
1973 / Bob Metcalfe / For inventing Ethernet
1973 / Paal Spilling / For establishing the first international node of the ARPANET
1973 / Peter Kirstein / For contributing to the international development of the ARPANET
1978 / Danny Cohen, David Reed, John Schoch / For promoting the split of TCP into TCP and IP, thereby allowing real-time traffic to be supported by UDP running over IP
1979 / Larry Landweber, Dave Farber, Tony Hearn, Peter Denning / For conception and development of CSNET
1981 / David Clark / For development of one of the first host implementations of the ARPA network protocols
1983 / Paul Mockapetris, Jon Postel / For co-inventing the Domain Name System
1983 / Barry Leiner / For assembling and editing a key paper entitled "A Brief History of the Internet"
1986 / Dave Mills,Bill Wolff, Dennis Jennings / For promoting and developing the NSFNET
1988 / Al Gore / For providing strong support of the Internet in the US Government
1989 / Tim Berners-Lee / For conceiving and starting the World Wide Web
1993 / Marc Andreeson and Eric Bina / For the early implementation of Mosaic, the first widely used graphical Web Browser
1995 / Van Jacobson / For redesigning TCP/IP's flow control algorithms to better handle congestion

Copyright 2009, Leonard Kleinrock. Published at app2us.com with permission.