Robert Cailliau was born 26 January 1947 in Tongeren, Belgium. In 1969 he obtained a degree of Mechanical and Electrotechnical Engineering of the University of Ghent. He worked at the university until 1971, then did a Master of Science degree at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, USA after which he returned to the university in 1972. He was posted at the Royal Military Academy for his military service in 1973.

Robert then joined CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, in 1974. There he was part of the team converting the analog computer controls of the Proton Synchrotron accelerator to a computer-controlled system. He and Tim Berners-Lee, then a contract programmer for the conversion project, met there for the first time. During the period of 1986 to 1989 Robert was head of Office Computing systems for CERN and began thinking of a hypertext system to link all documentation over the CERN networks.

He took the opportunity of a restructuring of the Organisation to start investigating this idea seriously, and in 1990 teamed up with Tim Berners-Lee who had returned to CERN. Under the guidance of Mike Sendall, they both produced the foundation for the networked hypertext system that became the world wide web at the end of 1990. In 1993 together with a group at the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft Robert started the first www-based project funded by the European Commission. He was also instrumental in making CERN putting the Web technologies into the public domain (April 1990).

That same year he called for the First International WWW Conference which he organised for May 1994.

In 1994 he also started the “Web for Schools” project within the European Union. Over the same year he helped set up the Web Consortium that overlooks the WWW standards.

In the period 1995-1997 he gave his energy to the building of the Consortium, the transfer of WWW technologies from CERN to the Consortium, the Web conferences and the CERN intranet services.

He spent the last years of his career on public science communication for CERN, and retired in 2007.

LiveCode came into Robert’s life in 2002, as the ideal replacement for the over-aged Hypercard which he had been using since 1985. He has ported numerous personal applications and writes new ones often.

Robert has been awarded two Ph.D. Hon. (univ. Southern Cross, Australia, Univ. Ghent, Belgium), the ACM Software System Award, the Plantin Prize (City of Antwerp), the Medal of Recognition of the City of Geneva, and is Commander in the Order of King Leopold I of Belgium.

Robert is a long time LiveCode user and community member.

First delivered at the LiveCode Developer Conference in 2008. This great talk is as fresh, relevant, and entertaining today as it was in 2008. Robert Cailliau, the co-inventor of the world wide web, talks about how it all started, how the web ties in with programming languages, and how he feels about the options available to developers today.

Watch the live stream with us on Friday 12th June at 4.30 pm BST and join us for the live Q&A session.