remember now, but it would have been $400 or $600, because it didn’t work. I
took it back to our office—it was massive—and took it apart, and, as I powered
it up part by part, I realized that the power supply had broken. Once we fixed
the power supply, the computer just came right up. So we did our big contract
on that computer.
Livingston: How did you land these contracts as a young undergrad?
Lazaridis: When you have access to state-of-the-art education, and you know
how to use these machines—and you are comfortable with them—you just
have to make that one leap to realize that you can actually help people. There is
a need for that kind of experience, but the problem was that a lot of these companies
didn’t know they had that need. It was just a matter of breaking out of
your shell and going out and talking to them—looking in the newspapers, looking
in local message boards, talking to different companies, asking if they
needed any work done. Basically, you had to do a little bit of sales.
But what was interesting was that, in every case, you were able to bring this
experience to bear on a tricky problem that had been there for a while and that
you found that you could solve it very elegantly and quickly using what you’d
learned. That’s how we got these projects with General Motors and the
National Film Board and Kodak, which eventually led to the Emmy Award and
the Technical Oscar.
When you go back, you realize that the exposure you had in high school and
in university was actually preparing you for a decade and two decades out.
We need to make sure that we are allowing students to be exposed to future
technology and not reducing it to current—what a lot of people would like to
say, “relevant” teaching. What’s relevant teaching? What’s relevant research?
When I was at university, if you went in and started looking at what we were
doing, you would say, “Why don’t you guys get a life and do something relevant?
What is this stuff? Nobody’s going to use this.”
When we were there, that’s what people were thinking. “How many people
are going to have a computer in their house? What is this networking stuff? You
are talking about science fiction; you’re not talking about important things.
Why don’t you do something important?” “Important” back then became
“obsolete” very quickly after we left university.
Livingston: Was Doug part of the consulting business?
Lazaridis: Doug was at University of Windsor, and we collaborated. It wasn’t
until I decided to start RIM that I called Doug up and told him what I wanted

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