There is an awful lot of the early history of the web that has been lost. TBL created a simple protocol and a basic browser, both of which existed in other forms at the time. Success was both a factor of luck and a lot of hard work by other folk. Probably one of the smarter things he did was to work with MIT to found the W3C which helped guide the development of the web.
FWIW. Sun was a very large player in a lot of those early activities.