to do and I needed his help. He was up within 2 weeks of that call.
Livingston: Did you have to tell your parents you weren’t finishing school?
Lazaridis: Oh yeah. But what was actually harder was having to go to the president
of the university and ask for a leave of absence. I had never met him
before. It was quite interesting because he apologized for having to try to dissuade
me from it. After he finished his speech, he wished me the best of luck
and shook my hand with a big smile. I remembered that and, ironically, 20 years
later he’s one of RIM’s board members.
Livingston: So you start RIM, and you have a $600,000 contract with General
Motors. What were you doing?
Lazaridis: One of the things we did was that we listened to what General
Motors was trying to accomplish. The RFP had been out for over 2 years. We
got a copy of it and looked at it, and we recognized a couple things in there that
you couldn’t do without some of the state-of-the-art techniques that we’d
learned at university. One was that it was begging for a local area network. So
we had to create one, based on what we remembered.
I went back and talked to some of the teachers there and looked at some of
the research that was being done. We had to develop that LAN from scratch,
but we had to also make sure that it was very rugged, because it had to be used
Mike Lazaridis 145
in a very hostile environment in these manufacturing plants. There were things
like arc welders and 4800-volt systems. It was a tricky thing to do. Then we
made sure that the display systems could boot from a central computer. If you
think about it, even today, we’re just starting to realize the “diskless PC”—PCs
that boot up remotely, sort of the Internet appliances today. We had to come up
with a system that could do that.
Then, of course, what was interesting was that we got to play with one of the
first IBM PCs. I remember it was just about the time when we ordered it that
the big hard drives were coming out. We changed our order from the tape system
to a hard drive system. We thought that was just a luxury. That was a
whopping 10-megabyte hard drive.
Livingston: I read that you got a grant from the Canadian government. Why
did you apply? Were you seeking money to grow?
Lazaridis: You have to realize that the early days aren’t pretty. You are worrying
about paying rent. Doug and I were sharing a leased Honda Civic. The big luxury
in that car was the option we took out for a five-speed transmission instead
of a four-speed. We lived in the same apartment, but the whole thing was just