Founders at Work.pdf

Mike Lazaridis 143
At the same time, my electronics teacher was also the president of the local
amateur television and ham radio club. So he had us taking apart televisions
and converting their tuners for use at the amateur band. Back then, we knew
how to tune them, but we didn’t really understand what we were doing. It
wasn’t until university that we started to get that understanding, but we saw
how the stuff worked; we saw the potential. When my teacher started to see us
really get seduced by the computer and what we could do there, I remember
him saying, “Don’t get too caught up with computers, because it’s going to be
the person that puts wireless technology and computers together that’s going to
make a big difference.” I don’t think he was seeing what we eventually did, but
he understood the fact that computers gave us two fundamental things. One
was the ability to send information unambiguously, and the second was that it
allowed us to control the RF process and make it more efficient. It wasn’t until
years later that I understood what that meant.
So we went to university and, again, this is the early ’80s, so you’re talking
about stuff that was going on at university that most people had no clue as to
what it was, what it meant, and its relevance. The University of Waterloo had
this massive computer system. It was a big IBM mainframe system that was the
centerpiece of the campus. But more importantly, it was the centerpiece of the
vision of the founders and the faculty there. It was in a massive room we called
the Red Room, which was literally right out of a science fiction movie—it had a
raised floor with a windowed mezzanine going right around it, and inside you
had all these computers.
In all the classrooms around the mezzanine area were these terminals. We
were just converting from punch cards to video terminals, so again, it was that
transition period. I arrived just in time not to have to use punch cards. I went
straight to terminals. And we started using something called “email” to get and
submit our assignments—as well as using it to collaborate between ourselves.
We started working with the Internet. It was called the ARPANET back then,
and it was a collaboration between universities, researchers, businesses, and the
military. We didn’t think much of it, but we were being trained to use something
that really wouldn’t become mainstream for at least another decade.
At the same time, we were working with computer networks. This was when
computer networks were research projects at universities. In fact, we had our
own research program called Watlan (Waterloo Local Area Network Project).
We had compilers, real-time operating systems—you don’t really see the relevance
these things are going to have in your life because you’re so caught up in
the workload and the social environment. You don’t realize that you’re being
trained with state-of-the-art technology, applications, and techniques. As time
went on, we started realizing that this stuff was pretty cool—it was pretty
advanced technology—and we started getting more and more involved with the
various aspects of these different programs and research projects.
In my later years, I took on projects where I was helping some of the faculty
projects, just basically trying to pay my way. When the last year came, I had
already been doing some computer programming contract work. It was then