I'm surprised (or I missed some part of the entire thread) nobody mentioned Bittorrent! The entire protocol and the original client was designed by one person: Bram Cohen. Think about some of the most efficient way to distribute large data over the internet and there is one single mind behind it. Of course, there are plenty of fancy GUI-powered clients today but the very original idea belongs to one person. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Cohen