Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry Read Online Free PDF

jammed with dozens of large, multicolored cabinets, flashing light consoles, and a few studious young men and women operating desktop computers. It was early 1979 and Lazaridis was feasting his eyes on the fabled Red Room at the University of Waterloo. The room housed an IBM 360 Model 75, Canada’s largest, fastest computer. The Red Room was a testament to the vision of businessmen and scholars who, in 1957, founded a university in a Mennonite farming community an hour’s drive west of Toronto. The need for engineers was so urgent in the postwar boom era that Waterloo founders set up a co-op program that dispatched students each term to semester-long jobs so they could apply their learning in a commercial environment.
    The program bridged the academic and corporate divide, allowing for collaboration on such ambitious projects as the Red Room in the 1960s. IBM sold the machine to the University of Waterloo at a discount and the Ontario government subsidized the $3 million acquisition, an item so alien to purchasing categories that the computer was listed as “furnishings.” Lazaridis did not see furniture when he visited the computer science department with his parents during his final year of high school. He saw the future. “I just looked down into the room,” he recalls, “and I said ‘This is where I am going.’ ”
    Wireless technology and computing were traveling toward each other at warp speed when Lazaridis enrolled in electrical engineering at Waterloo. The sprawling computer in the Red Room that so dazzled him in 1979 was unplugged in late 1980 to make way for smaller, more powerful mainframes and the arrival of early desktop computers. These systems were connected through local networks knitted together with cables. Long before e-mail, Lazaridis and classmates were using the university’s network to hand in assignments or dispatch messages over the pioneering Arpanet, the U.S. military’s Advanced Research Projects Agency Network—the Internet’s forerunner. “It was a whole new world. Everything was new,” says Lazaridis. “It was like a fantasyland.”
    Just as he had divided studies at W. F. Herman, Lazaridis explored various disciplines at Waterloo. He supplemented core electrical engineering courses with computer science and physics classes. Of all his studies, it was quantum mechanics that made the greatest impact on him. Classical physics theories were being challenged in the early 1980s. Longstanding formulas that revealed how liquids were heated or why vehicles accelerated downhill had little application in the world of atoms and subatomic particles. One father of the emerging offshoot of classical physics was David Bohm, an American-born physicist whose dabbling in Marxism forced him to leave the country in the McCarthy era. The intuitive scientist continued his work abroad. Borrowing from religious, biological, psychological, and artistic influences, he theorized that atoms and particles were part of a deeper, intricate order in which they were influenced by the properties of other particles. While it would be decades before scientists would be able to apply Bohm’s theories to breakthrough experiments in quantum mechanics, the unorthodox thinking encouraged students to explore new frontiers.
    “It was a new age,” Lazaridis explains. “We had this belief that all sorts of stuff was about to get transformed, from technology to the way we thought about the universe.” Bohm’s theories were so influential that when Lazaridis learned the scientist would be speaking in Ottawa in May 1983, he and a group of friends approached the pending visit like religious pilgrims. “We all wanted to go to Ottawa. We had no money. A couple of us said we can do this, it didn’t need to be impossible,” Lazaridis says.
    The Waterloo students eventually made their way to Ottawa. Listening to the lecture, Lazaridis felt that he was in the presence of an “enlightened” man who “crackled” with