WWW Founder Shares Vision at RevLive


Robert Cailliau Interviewed by Heather Nagey

We have some major news for you this week on Revolution Live: a date change and an illustrious new speaker. As announced on the revamped Revolution Live website, the date for this event has changed - if you haven't already, please put the new date in your diaries, 8-11th May 2008.

There were several reasons for delaying the conference. An important part of the conference is demonstrating the exciting new technology we are working on for the next generation of Revolution. However, in the short term  the user community told us very clearly that what they most wanted was a solid, stable 2.9 release with the Linux platform updated, and that is what we have been working very hard on delivering.  But consequently work on post 2.9 technology is not as advanced as we had intended when we originally arranged the January dates. Delaying the conference until May allows us to bring you the best possible experience in regard to showing off new technology.

The conference in May is fast lining up to be an unmissable event. We're pleased to announce our latest speaker: Robert Cailliau. This entertaining and charming man, a Revolution expert who has been with us for many years, is also the co-founder of the World Wide Web. If you've been reading the last few issues of this newsletter with his beautifully written and fascinating tutorial about cannonballs, you will be in no doubt as to his Revolution credentials. We're really excited that he has volunteered to share with the community his views on the relevance of Revolution in today's world as well as his experience with the world-changing invention of the web.

I'm delighted that Robert has agreed to an interview for this newsletter, so without further ado, here it is:

Photo CERN

Tell us about yourself, what you do, your work?

If I look back on the whole of my career, it seems that I have always worked on human-machine interfaces. It started already with the improvement programme that I undertook in the lab for mechanical engineering way back in 1969 at the university of Ghent. Then I studied computing and controls in the US for a year, concentrating on operating systems and programming languages. When I came back to Ghent in 1972 a friend and I used the hybrid computer (whatever that was) to check the modeling of world human behaviour as set forth in the famous "Report of the Club of Rome" on "Limits to growth". That shows I was already interested in the problems that we see only now, 40 years later: overpopulation, shortage of raw materials, pollution, climate change. In 1974 I ended up at CERN.

CERN is a marvellous place. I should tell you more about it, but there is http://www.cern.ch, the oldest web site of them all. CERN is a common laboratory, originally for physicists from Europe, but now a world laboratory. There is nothing like it elsewhere. CERN provides the large, high-energy accelerators needed for the experiments that will teach us more about the fundamental particles and forces of nature. I stayed at CERN until my retirement in 2007. But during that time I had at least four very different activities.

First I took part in the renovation project of the control system of CERN's accelerators. We hired a number of contract programmers to finish the job, and one of them was Tim Berners-Lee. Tim used my Pascal compiler to write a program called "Enquire" which was his first attempt at a hypertext system. But he left shortly afterwards for a spell in Britain.

Another friend and I had written a text processing system for serious "Office Automation" as it was then called. On the basis of that I was appointed head of Office Computing Systems, which became my second large activity at CERN. After a while I concluded that we should base everything on a networked hypertext system, but nobody in my group wanted to study this idea. In 1989 there was a large restructuring effort, and I took the opportunity to do that study myself. Tim had come back to CERN, and very soon we met and worked together on his "Proposal for Information Management". After calling it World Wide Web we were allowed to do some development on it for a year. WWW became very quickly popular with the physicists. After 1993 it really exploded and I had my hands more than over-full until about 1999.

The WWW experience taught me how difficult it was to communicate strange ideas to people who had never heard of them. As the last large activity I therefore concentrated on communications and was head of CERN's External Communications until the end of my career.

Right now, I'm having fun doing all the personal projects that were shelved during the hectic WWW years.

You are of course famous for your involvement in the invention of the World Wide Web, can you tell us a little about that?

The best thing would be to read the book but unfortunately it is out of print, so you'll have to look for a second-hand copy. I've mentioned above how I gradually moved from programming human interaction systems to documenting them to making text processors and finally to hypertexts. Given that physicists come to CERN for an experiment and then go back to their universities, there was a great need to have a document base that could be consulted from anywhere and from any platform. WWW was an obvious solution. But I'm going to talk about this phase of my life and of the life of WWW at the Las Vegas conference, I'd rather not pre-empt that. Let me just say that we had practically everything you see on the web now already on our NeXT systems in 1990. It was also a very, very exciting time for anyone involved and there are a large number of unbelievably funny anecdotes, none of which I will tell you here!

How did you come across Revolution?

Ah! I had been using Hypercard since 1985. I had also written a web editor and content manager in Hypercard for myself and some friends at CERN. I still today make my presentations in standard HTML using that stack! Then Hypercard disappeared. But I had lots of stacks. Luckily there was Classic (until Intel Macs). But I understood very well that at some point I would have to move. I know of no elegant programming language available today except Hypertalk or Transcript. I got very afraid: imagine the hell of having to program in C or BASIC! I've done that and it is really painful: you spend all your time debugging instead of developing.

So once in a while, late in the day during dark and stormy nights, I would trawl the net for Hypercard-like systems. One day I found Revolution. I've bought every version since 1.1.1.

I still have not converted my HTML system, it's rather specific. Unlike Keynote or PowerPoint it allows me to structure the content. Maybe during a dark weekend this winter and before Las Vegas I'll attempt a conversion.

I'll say something about the Hypercard to Revolution odyssey at Las Vegas.

What was your first experience of Revolution like?

"Good", but I knew what I was expecting of course. I was especially delighted that the Revolution team had managed to clean up the system and the language, and had managed to put the graphics part right! Not to mention the speed! Some of my early problems with Hypercard remain though. Don't forget that at CERN in 1990 we had a brain wave of writing the Mac browser in Hypercard. But if you want to hear more, come to Las Vegas!!

What do you use it for now?

Any little thing I need, I just open Revolution, write it and then forget it. All my banking information is kept in one large spreadsheet. I live on the frontier: half in Switzerland (not EU, no euros) half in France (EU, euros) and I have some things left in Belgium (yet another banking culture). I have four stacks that convert the electronic data from the different banks into a single format that I use.

I've written games. But I also have a stack that renames all my digital photos by using the EXIF data. I realise that a number of such utilities are out there, but none of them do what mine does. I wrote a file rename utility for my daughter, a professional biologist, who could not find what she wanted for her scientific data.

My big project is a Hyperbook generating program I call iAlbum. Maybe I'll show some results in Las Vegas. Again people have told me some programs exist out there, but none of them is flexible and allows hierarchies. iPhoto is pathetic.

Ah, yes, and I am teaching programming to kids who have severe learning/social difficulties on the charity "Not School", using Revolution of course.

Here is a little example of something I use Revolution for. It has made my travelling life with a laptop much more comfortable. Whenever Mac OS X starts up it plays a startup sound. That can be very annoying if you have to start your laptop in a meeting.

This code puts an end to the startup sound, but still preserves the user's soundlevel:

on StartUp
put url ("file:"&specialfolderpath("Preferences")&"/ShutDownItemsPreferences") into lPrefs
if the result is empty then -- there were valid preferences
set the playloudness to line 1 of lPrefs
else -- defaults
set the playloudness to 50
end if
end StartUp

on ShutDown
put the playloudness into lPrefs
put lPrefs into url ("file:"&specialfolderpath("Preferences")&"/ShutDownItemsPreferences")
set the playloudness to 0
end ShutDown

The attached application implements it. All one has to do is to include the application in the list of start-up applications and then forget it.

How do you feel it compares with other programming environments?

I'm a very old programmer. I started as a "guru", you know, the white-frocked IT professional whose attitude is that life would be better if there were only IT and no IT users. But then I made the fatal mistake of wanting to help people understand computers. I became a user. Worse, in 1984 I bought myself a system that could not be operated without a mouse! IT heresy: a Mac. The secretaries could operate it without needing to call in the gurus! Job insecurity for IT gurus, but not for me, I switched. And I taught a lot of CERN engineers how to program. That experience led to my "Three criteria for programming languages" which I exposed at a physics conference in 1988. But I'll show you those in... Las Vegas.

Only Revolution satisfies all three criteria.

We're thrilled that you've agreed to speak at our conference, what kind of thing will you be talking about?

Er... I think I have given some hints above. I'll do my "history of the web" bit because of the anecdotes (anyone who brings a copy of the book will get it dedicated), and then I'll talk about programming, user interfaces and functionalities. Plus briefly mentioning the one-and-only problem that's facing the world, because whatever we are involved in, we can't ignore that one.

I read that you are a synaesthetic on your website - fascinating. What colour is "Revolution" for you?

Hmmm... red green blue white darkblue blue black white white brown The tints vary a bit, but you should find it corresponds to the alphabet I put up.

On the whole it starts red (because of the R) and fades through blue to white. This is INDEPENDENT of the fact that by coincidence you have chosen the same colours for the Revolution logo. For example, to my synaesthetic eye the word "Google" does not look at all like their logo.

Does being able to see letters in different colours help with writing accurate code?

Never thought about that one, but I guess it does. I'll think about it and tell you in Las Vegas.

Well, I for one can't wait. Get your tickets now, with 10% off the earlybird discount until the end of December, and we'll see you at Las Vegas!