Big Money or/and Respect

I was listening to the radio in my car this morning and overheard an interview with the Flemish godfather of the internet, Mister Robert Cailiau.

In December 1974 he started working at CERN as a Fellow in the Proton Synchrotron (PS) division, working on the control system of the accelerator. In April 1987 he left the PS division to become group leader of Office Computing Systems in the Data Handling division. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee proposed a hypertext system for access to the many forms of documentation at and related to CERN. Berners-Lee created the system, calling it World Wide Web, between September to December 1990. During this time, Cailliau and he co-authored a proposal for funding for the project. Cailliau later became a key proponent of the project.

I was surprised as I didn’t know that a Flemish (Belgian) guy was the inventor of the World Wide Web and it took place exactly 20 years ago from today (13/03/1989).
At the end of the interview they asked him how much money he gained of his invention and his answer was…. 0 $ as he was working for the university and not for a private instance. The guy has to do it with respect; well he deserves every bit of it.

The founders of the technologies we use today aren’t that celebrated as they should be, and others, well others are big money earners.

Here is a list of the richest people in Tech (source: Forbes)

1. Bill Gates (Microsoft), $57 billion
2. Larry Ellison (Oracle), $27 billion
3. Michael Dell (Dell), $17.3 billion
4. Paul Allen (Microsoft), $16 billion
5. Sergey Brin (Google), $15.9 billion
6. Larry Page (Google), $15.8 billion
7. Steve Ballmer (Microsoft), $15 billion
8. Jeff Bezos (Amazon), $8.7 billion
9. Rupert Murdoch (News Corp.), $6.8 billion
10. Pierre Omidyar (eBay), $6.3 billion
11. Eric Schmidt (Google), $5.9 billion
12. Steve Jobs (Apple), $5.7 billion
13. Gordon Moore (Intel), $4.4 billion
14. John Sall (SAS Institute), $4.4 billion
15. David Sun (Kingston Technology), $4 billion
16. John Tu, (Kingston Technology), $4 billion
17. Richard Shulze (Best Buy), $3.5 billion
18. Ray Dolby (Dolby), $2.9 billion
19. Mark Cuban (Broadcast.com), $2.6 billion
20. Irwin Jacobs (Qualcomm), $1.9 billion
21. Omid Kordestani (Google), $1.9 billion
22. Henry Samueli (Broadcom), $1.8 billion
23. David Filo (Yahoo), $1.7 billion
24. Amar Bose (Bose), $1.5 billion
25. Todd Wagner (Broadcast.com), $1.5 billion
26. Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), $1.5 billion
27. Richard Egan (EMC), $1.4 billion
28. Vinod Khosla (Sun Microsystems), $1.4 billion
29. Theodore Waitt (Gateway), $1.4 billion