We tried to bridge the gap and explain to the teachers and students upstairs
what we were learning down there and how we were applying the mathematics
and science we were learning upstairs. Literally we were. I was able to give lectures
to the math program, showing them how trigonometry could be applied
to power generation, power control, power transformation that we were learning
downstairs.
Livingston: I read that your high school electronics teachers said that connecting
computers to wireless would be the next big thing. Did you realize how big
it would be?
Lazaridis: Of course not. The thing back then is that you are juggling all these
courses and work, and at the same time you’ve got these passionate interests
that you just can’t find enough time for. You’re just trying to juggle it all, knowing
that you want to get to university, so you have to get good marks. It was a bit
of a challenge because you really had an extra course load. These shop programs
were almost like a course to themselves, there was so much work to do.
You just spent every waking hour—you come to school early, you go to the
shop, work a little bit further on it, then after school you go down there and
hope that you can finish your homework in time to keep working on what you
were doing.
It was a grueling time, but it was rewarding in the sense that we had all
these resources, and we basically had a brand new curriculum, so it could go as
far as we were prepared to take it. Doug and I started learning about computers
on our own. This was back in the late ’70s. Computers were still punch card
systems that were in some other building that you never got to see. But Doug
and I started playing with these computer trainers—they were Digital
Equipment Corporation computer trainers—and what we learned there was
the actual fundamentals of computers: how to build gates, how to build recent
memory circuits, how to build registers, and how to wire them all together and
sequence them with a clock. It was very fundamental knowledge, and it really
made a difference as time went on.
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

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