Robert Cailliau

Cocreator of the World Wide Web

• Born: January 26, 1947
• Place of Birth: Tongeren, Belgium

Primary Company/Organization: World Wide Web

Introduction

Robert Cailliau is a Belgian-born engineer and computer scientist who, independently of Tim Berners-Lee, proposed a project to develop a hypertext system at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Conseille Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or CERN), also known as the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. The project resulted in the World Wide Web. In 1990, Cailliau joined Berners-Lee as a partner in his attempt to win approval for the Berners-Lee proposal. Cailliau rewrote the project proposal, lobbied management for funding, and collaborated with Berners-Lee on papers and presentations. In 1992, Cailliau produced Samba, the first web browser, for the Apple Macintosh. He was instrumental in the push to secure approval of the document that allowed CERN to place the web technology in the public domain in 1993. He is also a founding member and past chairman of the International World Wide Web Conference Committee.

Early Life

Robert Cailliau was born January 26, 1947, in Tongeren, Belgium. His ancestors have lived in Flanders, the northern part of Belgium, since early in the seventeenth century. His parents moved the family to Antwerp in 1958. Cailliau attended school in Antwerp from the time he was eleven until he graduated in 1964. He then attended the University of Ghent, where he received a degree in electrical and mechanical engineering, the equivalent of a master's in science, in 1969. After graduation, he continued his association with the University of Ghent, working at the Laboratory of Mechanical Engineering. His work there inspired him to learn more about computers, and he left for the United States. He spent nine months at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, obtaining a master's degree in computer, information, and control engineering.

When he returned to Belgium, he worked at the Laboratory of Control and Hybrid Computation, where he helped develop software for the hybrid computer. About this time, he paid his first visit to CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. From this point, his ambition was to work on a CERN project, but Belgium required a year of military service of all able-bodied males. Completing his military service took priority. He was stationed at the Royal Military Academy and initially assigned to infirmary duty. However, he was soon transferred to the School of War, where he spent the remainder of his term of service in the computer center maintaining a large troop-movement simulation program, which he compared to SimCity with text data only. He wrote Fortran programs for the simulation, but during that time he also learned ALGOL 68, a computer language he found poetic.

Life's Work

With his military service behind him, Cailliau was free to pursue his dream of working at CERN. He received a fellowship in 1974 to work in the proton synchrotron division on an improvement program for the control systems of the accelerator complex. When the fellowship ended, he was hired and began working on document markup and formatting. In 1975, he designed and implemented a widely used document markup and formatting system. From 1987 to 1989, he ran CERN's Office Computing Systems group. In 1987, he moved to the Data Handling Division. Restructuring within CERN led to another move two years later, this time to the Electronic and Computing for Physics Division.

As early as 1974, Cailliau had introduced to CERN a system that allowed the easy transfer of documents, code, and files. Before he met Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, Cailliau was already using Hypercard, an Apple programming environment that could be used to create custom applications. Cards could be linked to one another, like hypertext links on the web. He was working on his own proposal to develop a hypertext system for CERN when he met Berners-Lee, whose own hypertext proposal was further along than Cailliau's. Enthusiastic about the possibilities of combining hypertext and networking, Cailliau began working with Berners-Lee. Cailliau is often identified as coinventor of the web, but both men have made clear that the specifications for universal document identifiers (later known as uniform resource locators, or URLs), the hypertext language, the protocol, and the code of the original implementation were the work of Berners-Lee.

Some have called Cailliau an evangelist for the web; others describe his role as that of a manager. CERN calls him the number-one advocate of Berners-Lee's proposal. However, everyone, including Berners-Lee, agrees that Cailliau's role was essential to the success of the project. He rewrote Berners-Lee's proposal to make it more specific and likelier to appeal to an administrator. He had been a group leader for several years at this point and possessed knowledge of CERN's hierarchy that Berners-Lee lacked. Cailliau himself views his contribution primarily as a securer of resources. On a minimal budget, he found computers, offices, and people. He pleaded with management for young programmers who were at CERN for a year as part of the Technical Student Program, and he succeeded in getting a fair number assigned to the web project. Some of the students went on to do work that earned them a place in web history, including Henrik Frystyk Nielsen, who helped to create hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP).

Understanding that CERN was a physics laboratory and, as such, unlikely to devote major resources to the web, Cailliau began to contact other groups with an interest in informatics. He forged ties with the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union; France's National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (known by its French acronym INRIA); and the Fraunhofer Society, Germany's application-oriented research institution. It was also Cailliau who devoted time and energy to persuading CERN's management to give the World Wide Web (WWW) technology away without requiring royalties, a task that took eighteen months, six of them requiring Cailliau's working with the CERN legal service to prepare the document that put the web technology into the public domain on April 30, 1993.

In May 1994, Cailliau organized the first International WWW Conference, which was held at CERN. More than six hundred web enthusiasts showed up for the conference; CERN could accommodate only four hundred of them. By the second WWW conference, held in Chicago in October 1994, eighteen hundred people showed up, five hundred more than could be admitted. Also in 1994, Cailliau cofounded the International WWW Conference Committee (IW3C2), the group that became responsible for organizing the international conferences that provided a forum focused on the development of the web, the standardization of its technologies, and its impact on society and culture. That year, he persuaded the European Commission that the web was a learning tool and started the Web for Schools project. Cailliau continued as a member of IW3C2 through 2004.

Cailliau retired from CERN in 2007 after thirty-two years of service. During those years, he variously worked on control engineering, user interfaces, text processing, administrative computing support, and hypertexts. He ended his CERN career as head of CERN's External Communications, part of the Directory Services Unit, where his duties included looking after CERN's Intranet and Web presence. Cailliau continues to speak on the web and web-related issues. He was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012.

Personal Life

Cailliau is a neurological rarity: He has synaesthesia, a condition in which two or more senses are linked. In his case, letters have colors. He finds the disorder sometimes useful in spell checking, because his eye can detect errors in the color patterns of words. His synaesthesia played a role when he designed the historical logo of the World Wide Web (WWW), three superimposed Ws, which were green not to signal green technology (as might be assumed) but because Cailliau sees the letter W as green.

When Cailliau has been asked to consider changes in the web in the more than two decades since he helped to develop it, he has expressed mixed reactions. He approves of blogging, finding the practice close to the idea that he and Berners-Lee had at the beginning of the web as a means whereby anyone can create original content. He has concerns about the inability to control one's data on social media sites and has admitted to avoiding them for that reason.

Bibliography

Berners-Lee, Tim, et al. “The World Wide Web.” Communications of the ACM 37.8 (1994): 76–82. Print.

Brun, René, Frederioco Carminati, and Giuliana Galli Carminati, eds. From the Web to the Grid and Beyond: Computing Paradigms Driven by High-Energy Physics. New York: Springer, 2012. Print.

Gillies, James, and Robert Cailliau. How the Web Was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. Print.

Marchant, Joanna. “Out of the Shadows.” New Scientist 167.2253 (2000): 41–43. Print.

Svedin Ulrik. "I Didn't Like the Name World Wide Web." Linkoping University, 13 Sept. 2023, liu.se/en/news-item/i-did-not-like-the-namn-world-wide-web-robert-cailliau. Accessed 7 Mar. 2024.

Zimmer, Ben. “Web.” The New York Times Magazine14 Nov. 2010: MM34. Print. T