Robert Cailliau | Biography

Robert Cailliau is most well-known for the proposal, developed with Tim Berners-Lee, of a hypertext system for accessing documentation, which eventually led to the creation of the World Wide Web.

Robert Cailliau was born in Tongeren, Belgium, in 1947. The first 11 years of Cailliau's life were spent in Tongeren, until his parents moved to Antwerp. After graduating from high school in 1964 Cailliau attended the University of Ghent at Flanders where he studied engineering (he would have preferred to stay at Antwerp, but at the time there was no university there). After graduation Cailliau remained at the University of Ghent where he took a position at the Laboratory of Mechanical Engineering. While there he improved the data collection techniques within the laboratory and introduced many digital instruments that allowed results to be recorded and subsequently handled with a separate computer. At the time (late 1960s and early 1970s), total computerization of a laboratory of this nature was not a practical option. Cailliau did want to introduce computers where possible and he went to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, to obtain a Masters degree in computer, information, and control engineering, which would allow him to apply computers to data recording.

On returning to Belgium Cailliau worked as assistant to Professor A. Van Cauwenberghe at the Laboratory of Control and Hybrid Computation where he helped develop software for the hybrid computer. It was during this time that Cailliau first visited CERN, and after this visit he decided that he wished to work for the CERN project. At this point his career was interrupted by national service and Cailliau spent a year in the army where he wrote FORTRAN programs that simulated troop movements. In 1974 Cailliau obtained a position at CERN. Initially employed on a fellowship, Cailliau worked in the Proton Synchrotron division on an improvement program for the control systems of the accelerator complex. After his fellowship Cailliau was employed as a staff member, at which point he started working on document mark-up and formatting systems. In 1987 he transferred to become group leader of Office Computing Systems in the Data Handling division. In 1989, due to restructuring within CERN, Cailliau moved to the Electronics and Computing for Physics division. In 1990 Cailliau and Tim Berners-Lee proposed a hypertext system to allow easy access to CERN documentation. With Berners-Lee's knowledge of the Internet, this eventually led to the World Wide Web (a name they came up with during this period). Prior to this Cailliau had been using Hypercard and all of the buildings at CERN were connected with Appletalk; it was his desire to see interdepartmental documentation that could be navigated around with hypertext that led to his innovative work. In reality this was a massive extension of the systems that Cailliau had introduced to CERN in 1973 and 1974. which had allowed the easy transfer of documents, code and files.

In 1992 Cailliau produced the first Web browser for the Apple Macintosh. In 1994 Cailliau was one of the co-founders of the International WWW Conference Committee (IW3C2) after successfully organizing the first conference earlier that year. In 1995 Cailliau was awarded the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Software System Award for development of the World Wide Web. This award was jointly awarded to Tim Berners-Lee, as well as to Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina, the latter two for their work on developing Mosaic (a forerunner of the Netscape browser).

At the start of the twenty-first century Cailliau was head of CERN's Web office where his duties included looking after CERN's Intranet and Web presence. Although Cailliau works for the Swiss-based CERN project, he lives in France, which makes for interesting commuting. Cailliau suffers from the rare condition of synesthesia, a mismatch of the senses. In Cailliau's case, letters have colors. To describe it, he says that the word CERN is yellow, green, red, and brown. He finds this an amusing and sometimes useful condition, as it can work as a built-in spell check.