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The INQUIRER Top 10 Things Canada gave tech
From Delrina to DAAMIT
By Martin Veitch: Friday 06 July 2007, 12:19
O CANADA! It's the second-biggest country in the world by land size with plenty enough room to accommodate the millions of singer-songwriters that grow freely on her fertile land. Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot, all those guys - harmonicas and acoustic guitars on every corner not already covered by the French-speaking mooses, fighting ice-hockeyers and Mounties riding by.
Terrible beer, great people. Waffles and crispy bacon for breakfast. Lots of expats who couldn’t find a job in the cramped quarters of the British Isles. That politician guy Trudeau and his wife. Yup, without even having been there, we like to think we know the land of four strong winds and the maple leaf pretty well.
But what we hadn’t reckoned on was Microsoft laying down roots with a huge software development centre planned to open in Vancouver this autumn, or as the Canadians say, the fall.
Hang on though, Canada’s no slouch when it comes to tech. In fact, we’re sure we can dig out an INQUIRER Top 10 Things Canada Gave Tech…
10. Delrina Remember paying top dollar for then ability to fax from Windows? Well, if it’s any comfort you were paying top Canadian dollar because the WinFax maker was based in Toronto. Delrina also made headlines for a legal spat with Berkeley Systems over flying-toasters screensavers. Symantec bought the shop and continued with WinFax to 2006, perhaps in the hope that meddling red-tape merchants would force Microsoft to remove faxing from Windows, or that pesky email would go away.
9. Corel Under the leadership of Sussex-born Michael Cowpland, Corel went on one of the craziest journeys in software history, always underpinned by its golden child CorelDraw, one of the first big winners on Windows apps. It tried Java, network computers, Linux and buying WordPerfect but struggled until Microsoft injected $135m of much needed cash in 2000. Corel is still going, though generating fewer headlines than in its halcyon days when it was among a bunch of companies with aspirations to compete head to head with Microsoft.
8. Nortel Networks Toronto-based Nortel has been more in the news for problems with US regulators recently but it remains a telecoms powerhouse.
7. Iphone Cisco said it had the name before Apple but Canadian VoIP provider Comwave says it has been using the moniker since 2004 and continues to use it now on a device that doesn’t look very black, iconic or life-changing.
6. Ken Iverson The IBM man who gave the world the APL programming language in 1957 was born in rural Alberta. APL stands for A Programming Language.
5. Open Text Waterloo, Ontario-based Open Text is the biggest remaining enterprise content management company not to have been swallowed by by an IBM, EMC, Oracle or similar.
4. Platform Computing A leader in grid computing.
3. Cognos The business-intelligence folks.
2. Research In Motion It looked a bit square and ugly and it made you feel a bit silly to use as a phone but no doubt about it, the Blackberry became one of the iconic devices of our time –- and the whole kaboosh came from Waterloo, Ontario. A shame then that for many its enduring legacy will be memories of being permanently on call.
1. ATI AMD bought the world’s second-largest GPU concern, based in Markham, Ontario, to create DAAMIT but still has its work cut out to catch Intel and Nvidia, damn it. µ
The INQUIRER Top 10 Things Canada gave tech
From Delrina to DAAMIT
By Martin Veitch: Friday 06 July 2007, 12:19
O CANADA! It's the second-biggest country in the world by land size with plenty enough room to accommodate the millions of singer-songwriters that grow freely on her fertile land. Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot, all those guys - harmonicas and acoustic guitars on every corner not already covered by the French-speaking mooses, fighting ice-hockeyers and Mounties riding by.
But what we hadn’t reckoned on was Microsoft laying down roots with a huge software development centre planned to open in Vancouver this autumn, or as the Canadians say, the fall.
Hang on though, Canada’s no slouch when it comes to tech. In fact, we’re sure we can dig out an INQUIRER Top 10 Things Canada Gave Tech…
10. Delrina Remember paying top dollar for then ability to fax from Windows? Well, if it’s any comfort you were paying top Canadian dollar because the WinFax maker was based in Toronto. Delrina also made headlines for a legal spat with Berkeley Systems over flying-toasters screensavers. Symantec bought the shop and continued with WinFax to 2006, perhaps in the hope that meddling red-tape merchants would force Microsoft to remove faxing from Windows, or that pesky email would go away.
9. Corel Under the leadership of Sussex-born Michael Cowpland, Corel went on one of the craziest journeys in software history, always underpinned by its golden child CorelDraw, one of the first big winners on Windows apps. It tried Java, network computers, Linux and buying WordPerfect but struggled until Microsoft injected $135m of much needed cash in 2000. Corel is still going, though generating fewer headlines than in its halcyon days when it was among a bunch of companies with aspirations to compete head to head with Microsoft.
8. Nortel Networks Toronto-based Nortel has been more in the news for problems with US regulators recently but it remains a telecoms powerhouse.
7. Iphone Cisco said it had the name before Apple but Canadian VoIP provider Comwave says it has been using the moniker since 2004 and continues to use it now on a device that doesn’t look very black, iconic or life-changing.
6. Ken Iverson The IBM man who gave the world the APL programming language in 1957 was born in rural Alberta. APL stands for A Programming Language.
5. Open Text Waterloo, Ontario-based Open Text is the biggest remaining enterprise content management company not to have been swallowed by by an IBM, EMC, Oracle or similar.
4. Platform Computing A leader in grid computing.
3. Cognos The business-intelligence folks.
2. Research In Motion It looked a bit square and ugly and it made you feel a bit silly to use as a phone but no doubt about it, the Blackberry became one of the iconic devices of our time –- and the whole kaboosh came from Waterloo, Ontario. A shame then that for many its enduring legacy will be memories of being permanently on call.
1. ATI AMD bought the world’s second-largest GPU concern, based in Markham, Ontario, to create DAAMIT but still has its work cut out to catch Intel and Nvidia, damn it. µ
