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...