Founders at Work.pdf

142 Founders at Work
This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but, to a student that just came to high
school—to read a manual on how to use an oscilloscope, how to use a signal
generator, a computer trainer, how to use all this advanced equipment—these
were tricky textbooks to get through and understand. Of course, once I was able
to prove that I knew how to use the equipment and what it did, I was able to
open the box. And we opened every single box.
Livingston: This was at a high school?
Lazaridis: Yeah. It was a tricky time back then because a divide between the
honor roll students and the shop students was beginning. The shop teachers
tried to correct it before it got out of control and became the culture there.
Many of us down in that shop program were also honor roll students. It was sort
of “Upstairs, Downstairs”—the upstairs math and computer science classrooms,
and then there was the downstairs shop program.
We tried to bridge the gap and explain to the teachers and students upstairs
what we were learning down there and how we were applying the mathematics
and science we were learning upstairs. Literally we were. I was able to give lectures
to the math program, showing them how trigonometry could be applied
to power generation, power control, power transformation that we were learning
downstairs.
Livingston: I read that your high school electronics teachers said that connecting
computers to wireless would be the next big thing. Did you realize how big
it would be?
Lazaridis: Of course not. The thing back then is that you are juggling all these
courses and work, and at the same time you’ve got these passionate interests
that you just can’t find enough time for. You’re just trying to juggle it all, knowing
that you want to get to university, so you have to get good marks. It was a bit
of a challenge because you really had an extra course load. These shop programs
were almost like a course to themselves, there was so much work to do.
You just spent every waking hour—you come to school early, you go to the
shop, work a little bit further on it, then after school you go down there and
hope that you can finish your homework in time to keep working on what you
were doing.
It was a grueling time, but it was rewarding in the sense that we had all
these resources, and we basically had a brand new curriculum, so it could go as
far as we were prepared to take it. Doug and I started learning about computers
on our own. This was back in the late ’70s. Computers were still punch card
systems that were in some other building that you never got to see. But Doug
and I started playing with these computer trainers—they were Digital
Equipment Corporation computer trainers—and what we learned there was
the actual fundamentals of computers: how to build gates, how to build recent
memory circuits, how to build registers, and how to wire them all together and
sequence them with a clock. It was very fundamental knowledge, and it really
made a difference as time went on.