III · The web
Paul Mockapetris
1948–
Inventor of DNS · USC ISI
Gave us
DNS. RFC 882 and RFC 883 in 1983. The hierarchical name system that replaced HOSTS.TXT.
The story
Designed DNS to handle a network of "thousands or millions" of hosts at a time when ARPANET had ~300. The decision to push delegation to the leaves is why DNS still works at internet scale.