ROBERT CAILLIAU

The Inventor of Linking and
Web Browsing

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Robert Cailliau is the man living in the shadow of Tim Berners-Lee when it comes to the story of the World Wide Web. Robert’s story starts in Tongeren Belgium, January 26 1947 when Cailliau was born. Growing up in Belgium, he went on to school at Ghent University. He graduated as a civil engineer focused in mechanical engineering and electrical engineering. After getting his bachelors degree in mechanical and electrical engineering, Cailliau didn’t think that was his full potential so he went on to try and acquire his master’s degree in computer information and control engineering from the University of Michigan. In 1971 Cailliau would graduate with his master’s degree. It is uncertain when Cailliau served in the Belgian military, whether it was before or after his pursuit of higher education. During his stint in the military Cailliau was still in the realm of computers as he was in charge of the maintenance of fortran systems for war games and stimulations involving the army's troops.
Following his Masters in Science, Cailliau eventually started working for CERN. This organization is well known as The European Organization for Nuclear Research that houses the large tunnels buried deep underground for use in particle acceleration experiments. Little did he know that the research center would soon become the birthplace of the World Wide Web. Cailliau would start working in the PS or Proton Synchtron Division of the research laboratories. Thirteen long years after his start in CERN, Robert would eventually leave the Proton Synchtron Division to become leader of Office Computing Systems in the Data Handling division. During this time, his colleague Tim Berners-Lee would propose a hypertext system for the research lab's mass of documents for easier transferal across the numerous labs in the complex. Cailliau would co-author the proposal for the whole project with Tim Berners-Lee in 1990.
After helping with hypertext, he would go on to head different projects creating different web browsers for a variety of systems including classic mac OS and Unix Flavors. Cailliau would also go on to work on another project called WISE, or the web information dissemination in Europe. The work in WISE would go on to allow the World Wide Web to be released into the public domain in April 1993. Cailliau is also the person who decided to hold the first international WWW conference shortly after its release into the public domain. Cailliau also played an integral role integrating the web into the education system with his web for schools project in collaboration with the European union. To this day Robert Cailliau is involved in the Internet community, not so much as an avid user or developer but as a speaker at many conferences pertaining to the subject. Sources