Larry and Sergey are smart visionary people, no doubt, but PageRank was known (not that that name) since the '50s, and even applied during the 80's to academic

Larry and Sergey are smart visionary people, no doubt, but PageRank was known (not that that name) since the '50s, and even applied during the 80's to academic references (offline hyperlinks, if you think about it ...). I'm not sure who deserves the credit for figuring out the meaning of the stationary distribution of a markov chain (that it exists follows from the Perron Frobenious theorem and may have been known before that), and I don't know who first applied it to references/hyperlinks - but it wasn't Larry and Sergey