I'd say the web actually started in 1989 at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (also known as CERN) It was here that researchers launched ENQUIRE-a project that aimed to facilitate the sharing of information between fellow researchers. The ENQUIRE program soon gave birth to the development of the World Wide Web and the launch of the first web page in 1991.
The thing that really made the World Wide Web workable was hypertext. Developed in the mid to late 1960s by Andries van Dam and Ted Nelson, hypertext allowed information to be categorized through a series of links and connections. Another very important breakthrough was the development of the web search engine. One of the most influential was WebCrawler, which debuted in 1994. WebCrawler was the first engine to index ALL of the text on a webpage, as opposed to other engines that only gathered page titles or links.
The person who contributed most to the Web as we know it was Tim Berners-Lee. It was Tim who proposed and developed the original concept of the WWW while working for CERN. He also wrote the first web browser and the first server, and is also credited with coining the phrase "World Wide Web." Often referred to as the inventor of the WWW, Tim is now the director of the W3 Consortium.
www.w3.org
www.zeltser.com/web-history
www.wikipedia.org
www.searchenginehistory.org