Robert Cailliau Quotes & Sayings

“There was a time when the community that was on the Net was homogenous and civilized. Now it's not. We're in the middle of chaos. It may calm down. But the alternative is that there's a total meltdown of the system and that it becomes unusable. That would be a catastrophe.”

“When we have all data online it will be great for humanity. It is a prerequisite to solving many problems that humankind faces.”

“The forced influence of advertising has given us completely useless TV. You don't want that on the Net. But most on-line information providers need to attract advertising - which slows download times and clutters the screen with windows.”

“At one point, CERN was toying with patenting the World Wide Web.”

“To me, the biggest surprise is that Google still functions despite the explosion in the number of sites.”

“If you operate a TV or radio station, you have to have a license. It has nothing to do with fundamental freedom. It has to do with protection of the average citizen against abuses.”

“What is hypertext? It is a method of giving a text more depth, structuring it, and letting the computer help you explore it. Links, like we know today - you see some blue underlined word and you click on it and it takes you somewhere else. That's the simplest definition of hypertext.”

“Because I'm a synesthete I see characters in colors and I perceive a W as green.”

“I'd like the reader to decide if he is willing to pay minute sums for content. I'd like the economics of web to be controlled between authors and readers, not advertiser.”

“The Web is actually a coming together of three technologies, if you like: the hypertext, the personal computer, and the network. So, the network we had, and the personal computers were there, but people didn't use them, because they didn't know what to use them for, except maybe for a few games.”