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
3. Larry Ellison (Oracle), $27 billion
11. Michael Dell (Dell), $17.3 billion
12. Paul Allen (Microsoft), $16 billion
13. Sergey Brin (Google), $15.9 billion
14. Larry Page (Google), $15.8 billion
15. Steve Ballmer (Microsoft), $15 billion
33. Jeff Bezos (Amazon), $8.7 billion
47. Rupert Murdoch (News Corp.), $6.8 billion
54. Pierre Omidyar (eBay), $6.3 billion
59. Eric Schmidt (Google), $5.9 billion
61. Steve Jobs (Apple), $5.7 billion
84. Gordon Moore (Intel), $4.4 billion
84. John Sall (SAS Institute), $4.4 billion
91. David Sun (Kingston Technology), $4 billion
91. John Tu, (Kingston Technology), $4 billion
105. Richard Shulze (Best Buy), $3.5 billion
144. Ray Dolby (Dolby), $2.9 billion
161. Mark Cuban (Broadcast.com), $2.6 billion
246. Irwin Jacobs (Qualcomm), $1.9 billion
246. Omid Kordestani (Google), $1.9 billion
262. Henry Samueli (Broadcom), $1.8 billion
281. David Filo (Yahoo), $1.7 billion
321. Amar Bose (Bose), $1.5 billion
321. Todd Wagner (Broadcast.com), $1.5 billion
321. Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), $1.5 billion
355. Richard Egan (EMC), $1.4 billion
355. Vinod Khosla (Sun Microsystems), $1.4 billion
355. Theodore Waitt (Gateway), $1.4 billion