I'd say the web can be traced to the end of World War II and was a gobal effort, involving mathematicians, scientists, physicists, and inventors who over the next fifty years turned their talents to computer programming. Individuals such as Ted Nelson, Douglas Engelbart, Tim Berners-Lee, and Robert Cailliau -- working in the United States and abroad -- each contributed to the present-day web.
Often their work overlapped -- as was the case with the development of hypertext systems. For example, Berners-Lee, working at the nuclear physics laboratory CERN during the 1980s, developed his first hypertext system for internal purposes: to track which scientists were working on which projects, and what software they were using. This occurred within five years of the work done by Nelson and Engelbart, and it would seem Berners-Lee benefited from their accomplishments.
Nelson, a filmmaker-turned computer programmer-turned sociologist, is credited with discovering hypertext and coining the word in 1963. His vision, quoting www.livinginternet.com/ Living Internet, "involved implementation of a docuverse, where all data was stored once, there were no deletions, and all information was accessible."
Engelbart entered the information technology field as a young US Navy radar technician in 1945, after being inspired by an Atlantic Monthly magazine article by Vannevar Bush about his "memex" automated library system. Throughout his career, which included work for the military, Engelbart maintained his "vision of an interface between man and machine, providing instant connection communication." The inventor of the first graphical user interface and the computer mouse, Engelbart was optimistic his work would benefit mankind, as cited in www.livinginternet.com/ Living Internet: "Many years ago, I dreamed that digital technology could greatly augment our collective human capabilities for dealing with complex, urgent problems. Computers, high-speed communications, displays, interfaces -- it's as if suddenly, in an evolutionary sense, we're getting a super new nervous system to upgrade our collective social organisms..."
The thing that really made the World Wide Web workable, based on my reading, occurred in April 1993, when Tim Berners-Lee obtained certification from CERN that the web technology and program code was in the public domain so that anyone could use it and improve it. According to www.livinginternet.com/ Living Internet,industry historians generally agree, however, that the Web's big breakthrough came with the introduction of the Mosaic Web browser, also in 1993. Prior to the release of Mosaic, graphics were not commonly mixed with text in web pages. Mosaic's graphical user interface allowed the web to become,by far, the most popular Internet protocol.
The person who contributed most to the Web as we know it was Tim Benders-Lee because he utilized the research of his predecessors, and had the vision to extend the World Wide Web from a networked information project at CERN to an information-sharing tool the world could employ.
www.w3.org/History.html: A Little History of the Web
www.netvalley.com/ archives/mirrors/robert_cailliau_speech.htm: A Short History of the Web
www.livinginternet.com/ Living Internet
href="http://www.w3.org/History.html"
href="http://www.netvalley.com/"
href="http://www.livinginternet.com/"