There was a seminal paper describing public key cryptography. It was pre-internet. He was at MIT copied and mailed to different CS researchers in the 1970s. He realized how astoundingly important it was for all of mankind and he was really adamant about the government not squelching or classifying it, or someone patenting all of it (he did not become part of RSA). (interestingly, the oz govt coming in and making Assange's CS work classified without his permission is one of the reasons he created wikileaks) It led to bitcoin and many other things. I don't recall his name but it is in one of the Bitcoin documentaries.

Without such visionaries and pioneers, we'd all be using ISDN 128k and text terminals.