I'd say the web actually started June-December of 1980, Tim Berners-Lee writes a notebook program, "Enquire-Within-Upon-Everything", which allows links to be made between arbitrary nodes. according to www.w3.org/History.htmlwith This is the most important breakthrough... thinking outside the box.... connecting us all.
The thing that really made the World Wide Web workable was creation of html, http and a web browser client software program to receive and interpret data and display results. Presented in a proposal by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989.
The person who contributed most the the Web as we know it was Tim Berners-Lee, because.... in his own words The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was on line, we could then use computers to help us analyse it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together. a very short history of the web. http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ShortHistory