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

confidence. He also remembers the small miracles that made his trip possible. A professor let the students drive a university van to the speech and friends secured rooms at an Ottawa fraternity. “The point was, we never gave up,” he now says. “We just believed we had to get there and see David Bohm.” Lazaridis would approach future challenges with the same sense of destiny.
    At the University of Waterloo, Lazaridis distinguished himself as an entrepreneur. He landed a plum work placement at the Canadian branch of the Minneapolis supercomputer maker Control Data Corporation. He then earned his way out of a tedious night shift running computer diagnostics by designing a program that automated the process. Lazaridis was given a series of increasingly important assignments working with Control Data’s “big iron”computers and was on track for a job in Minneapolis. The plans, however, were derailed by the company’s financial woes. The big computer maker responded ineptly to the arrival of microcomputers and spent most of the 1980s and 1990s shedding assets. It is now called Ceridian.
    The wrenching decline of a company staffed by so many smart and devoted engineers made a big impression on Lazaridis. Innovation could not thrive without corporate support and effective commercial strategies. Discouraged with the world of big business, he decided to be his own boss by starting a consulting company that designed computer solutions for local technology companies. For one of his first clients, he built a primitive memory card with custom software that eliminated the need for cumbersome floppy disks. He became so busy with his fledgling company that the university agreed to let him work for himself for his third-year co-op job placement. The $5,000 in profits he pocketed during the term allowed him to buy a new computer and take his father, Nick, on a fishing trip.
    Lazaridis loved running his own business. By the fourth year he was consumed with an innovation that he and Doug Fregin had toyed with in Micsinszki’s basement. By hooking up an early computer to a cathode-ray tube, the pair could transmit data to project information on a television screen. The device was a money saver for Micsinszki, who burned through expensive tubes broadcasting the recorded times and frequencies of his regular one-man ham radio talk show for fellow enthusiasts. At Waterloo, Lazaridis saw a grander application for the technology, and Fregin, who visited him frequently on breaks from his studies at the University of Windsor, shared his enthusiasm. During these get-togethers the old friends honed their high school innovation, creating a device with a custom-designed circuit board, computer memory, power supply, central processor, and a calculator-sized keyboard. Once wired into a cathode-ray tube, the system enabled users to type words that flashed onto television screens.
    The system, Lazaridis decided, would be called Budgie, a fun, consumer-friendly name that he believed would endear people to an electronic system that was difficult to explain or understand. By spring of 1984 he was so convinced the device represented a breakthrough that he traveled home to Windsor to tell his parents and the Micsinszkis that he and Fregin would be dropping out of university weeks before graduation to launch a new business. Margaret Micsinszki said she and her husband were shocked by his decision, but they had learned to trust Lazaridis’s determination. For Lazaridis, she says,“There were no roadblocks. He would persist until the experiment succeeded or the project worked.”
    While Fregin and University of Waterloo co-op student Chris Shaw wrote software code and perfected hardware for the Budgie, Lazaridis pitched the innovation to local businesses as a kind of digital advertising banner that could effortlessly flash new messages. When a local hardware store and shopping mall agreed to test the Budgie, the trio attracted local media attention. A