Waterloo was positioned to be a strong computing
centre in the 1960's in part through serendipity,
in that the timing was just right.
Waterloo was well-positioned in the early
1960's. Having been through a few generations
of hardware, now the focus really was on applications.
Ralph Stanton and Wes Graham were absolutely
key to the development of Computer Science here.
They were complementary. Wes had been hands-on
at IBM, so he was the guy who made it happen,
if you will, and Ralph brought in the good
students to support the program.
We had invited Bill Davis, who was Minister
of Education at the time, down here to give a talk,
 and at the end of the talk he said,
“Oh, by the way, I just signed a piece of
paper this morning that gives Waterloo a building
and a computer.”
And of course the room erupted. That really put us on the map. It was an incredible commitment, 
considering how many students there were at the University of Waterloo at the time. 
Canada’s largest computer, we didn’t have 10,000 students.
I think the Red Room really was quite important
in a way that’s a little hard to understand now,
because, at the time, great big mainframes
were a very important part of computing, 
in fact, they were the main thing in computing.
And, at the time the Math Building was built, we were able to acquire a really large mainframe computer,
and the Red Room was where it was
essentially on display as well as working,
and so people could come by and see this,
at the time, really marvelous tool that we’d acquired.
And that gave visibility to something
that otherwise might have been kind of hidden away.
The University of Waterloo Computer Museum has a number of really interesting artifacts in our collection.
We try to focus on things that are immediately relevant to what’s happened here at the University,
so we have the first computers
that were used here.
We have panels from an IBM 1620, an IBM System
360. We have computers that were essentially
created here in the 1970's and '80s.
There’s something called the MicroWAT, which
has effectively disappeared from history,
but remains important because it really helped
us, it really helps us today understand how
Computer Science is taught.
I think what’s kept us at the forefront
hasn’t been any single thing, other than
an ability and a willingness to grab onto
things that come by.
So that when the opportunity for the Oxford English Dictionary project came along, 
 when we saw an opportunity for computerized algebra
that led to Maple and so on, various individual
projects were things that people within the
School, or the Department at the time, were
willing to grab onto them.
And, rather than some grand plan that we would
do this in the 1970's and this in the 1980's,
I think it’s that willingness to pursue
new things that’s really kept us at the forefront.
We set a very, very strong motivation for
people to come here, and they’re still coming.
And of course, now we have a very strong reputation in Mathematics and Computer Science, 
and it builds on itself.
