CWI has a long history of development of programming languages: e.g. Algol60, Algol68.
I arrived here in 1982 on a sabbatical to help design a programming language.
Result: ABC
Used for cryptographic research, the basis of many cryptographic results used now.
Guido van Rossum working on an Operating System project, took ABC and developed a systems programming language based on it: Python.
Now amongst the top 5 languages worldwide.
November 1988, CWI is Europe's first internet node (speed 64kbps!)
We spin off two companies to introduce internet: one for the Netherlands, one for Europe.
We went on to develop a computing environment, Views.
If you saw it now, you would call it a browser:
When the web came along we understood what it was about.
I organised two workshops at the first web conference.
My research group span off the first Dutch Web company.
I helped with early work at W3C, and became chair of the HTML working group there for a decade.
Helped design HTML, CSS, XHTML, XForms, RDFa and several other technologies.
This group has also helped design SMIL, Timed Text, and epub.
Originally designed as a language for Forms on the web.
Now an application language/framework.
Reduces production time by an order of magnitude.
Poster-child example:
A certain company makes BIG machines (walk in): user interface is very demanding — traditionally needed 5 years, 30 people.
With XForms this became: 1 year, 10 people.
Do the sums. Assume one person costs 100k a year. Then this has gone from a 15M cost to a 1M cost. They have saved 14 million! (And 4 years)
My conclusion:
CWI has injected HUGE amounts of value into the world economy.
Research institutes can have the long-term vision to develop the things that industry will need outside their product-development timeframes.