Lawrence G. Roberts– He is an American scientist who received the Draper Prize in 2001 "for the development of the Internet". and the Principe de Asturias Award in 2002. As a program manager and office director at the Advanced Research Projects Agency, Roberts and his team created the ARPANET using packet switching techniques invented by British computer scientist Donald Davies. The ARPANET was a predecessor to the modern Internet. After receiving his PhD, Roberts continued to work at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Having read the seminal 1961 paper of the "Intergalactic Computer Network" by J. C. R. Licklider, Roberts developed a research interest in time-sharing using computer networks. In 1967, he was recruited by Robert Taylor in the ARPA Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) to become the program manager for the ARPANET. Wesley A. Clark suggested the use of a dedicated computer, called the Interface Message Processor at each node of the network instead of centralized control. Shortly afterwards, at the 1967 ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, Roberts met a member of Donald Davies' team (Roger Scantlebury) who presented their research on packet switching and suggested it for use in the ARPANET.

Dr. Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider was an American psychologist and computer scientist who is considered one of the most important figures in computer science and general computing history. He is particularly remembered for being one of the first to foresee modern-style interactive computing and its application to all manner of activities; and also as an Internet pioneer with an early vision of a worldwide computer network long before it was built. He did much to initiate this by funding research which led to much of it, including today's canonical graphical user interface, and the ARPANET, the direct predecessor to the Internet. He has been called "computing's Johnny Appleseed", for planting the seeds of computing in the digital age; Robert Taylor, founder of Xerox PARC's Computer Science Laboratory and Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center, noted that "most of the significant advances in computer technology—including the work that my group did at Xerox PARC—were simply extrapolations of Lick's vision. They were not really new visions of their own. So he was really the father of it all".

Leonard Bosack – along with his former wife Sandy Lerner, is a co-founder of Cisco Systems, an American-based multinational corporation that designs and sells consumer electronics, networking and communications technology and services. He was awarded the Computer Entrepreneur Award in 2009 for co-founding Cisco Systems and pioneering and advancing the commercialization of routing technology and the profound changes this technology enabled in the computer industry. He is largely responsible for pioneering the widespread commercialization of local area network (LAN) technology to connect geographically disparate computers over a multiprotocol router system, which was unheard of technology at the time. In 1990, Cisco's management fired his wife Sandy Lerner, and Bosack resigned. Bosack is currently the CEO of XKL LLC, a privately funded engineering company which explores and develops optical networks for data communications. His contribution was to work on the network router that allowed the computer network under his management to share data from the Computer Science Lab with the Business School's network. He met his wife Sandra Lerner at Stanford, where she was the manager of the Business School lab, and the couple married in 1980. Together in 1984 they started Cisco in Menlo Park.