Interview with Don Cowan

  • Anne Millar
    It is October 13th, 2022. This is an interview with Don Cowan for the Oral History Hub Pilot Project. The interviewer is Anne Millar.
  • Don Cowan
    Hello, there. Can you hear me?
  • Anne Millar
    I can. Hello, Dr. Cowan.
  • Don Cowan
    Hi, is -- can I call you Anne?
  • Anne Millar
    Yes, please. Please call me Anne.
  • Don Cowan
    My name is Don. Okay.
  • [ Laughter ] Sorry, I pushed the wrong button. Instead of the drive button on recording, I pushed leave meeting. My stupidity.
  • Don Cowan
    Oh, technology. It doesn't work with one little push.
  • Anne Millar
    Oh, geez. You know, in spite the fact of being in it now for 60-odd years, I still hate it. Some of the designs are terrible.
  • Don Cowan
    Well, it's so nice to meet you. Thank you so much for speaking with me today.
  • Anne Millar
    Oh, it's very nice to meet you. And great, I just love the idea of participating. It should be fun. I see you've got a History of Computer Science book there. Is that -- or is that Of Mud and Dreams?
  • Don Cowan
    Yes, Of Mud and Dreams and then McLaughlin's Waterloo book as well.
  • Anne Millar
    Oh, okay.
  • Don Cowan
    Yes. You're the first person to notice.
  • Anne Millar
    Well, I have them all, you know. I have all Ken's books and I've got, excuse me, of course, Of Mud and Dreams and -- -- a whole shelf full of the things. It's been a great place. I had a lot of fun here.
  • Don Cowan
    Well, I'd love, if you wouldn't mind if we jump right into it.
  • Anne Millar
    Yeah. Oh, please. I -- sorry, I'll start babbling if you're not -- if we're not careful here.
  • Don Cowan
    No. I -- just in terms of structure, I thought we'd kind of go almost chronologically. So, start with your early life and then move on to more specifically your time at Waterloo.
  • Anne Millar
    Sure, that's fine. How do you -- do you want to ask me some questions or what?
  • Don Cowan
    Yes. So typically, I just ask some questions, then it will become more conversational, I'm sure, as we continue. But I'd love to know where you grew up. I know you grew up in Toronto and you were raised in Toronto.
  • Anne Millar
    Yeah.
  • Don Cowan
    Yeah.
  • Anne Millar
    I was born in Toronto and actually raised in what in those days was called York Township, which was one of the main many municipalities that made up Toronto. And I went to a school called Fairbank Memorial I was on elementary school and I went to York Memorial Collegiate, which on my mother's side of the family was actually sort of the family high school in the -- my mother and both my uncles went there. Then it turned out later in life, my mother ended up as a secretary at the school. And then from there, I -- well, I had an uncle who was 12 years younger than -- or 12 years older than me, and he studied engineering physics at U of T. And so I decided that's what I wanted to do, too. So, I ended up in engineering physics at U of T in those days, which was 1956 is when I entered it and graduated from there in 1960.
  • And then my -- at the end of my undergraduate career, I wanted do a master's degree, and I'll let you in on a secret. I applied at U of T and they turned me down.
  • Anne Millar
    Their mistake.
  • Don Cowan
    Well, I don't know. In fact, is I think it turned out for the best. You know, it's one of those things where you luck out and you don't know it until later. Anyway, Ralph Stanton, who used to teach engineering physics, he was supposed to teach me in my second year, but by that time, had moved to Waterloo to, well, what's called the Associate Faculties. This hadn't become the university yet, was needed slave labour. He needed teaching assistance to help manage all the engineers that they were starting to teach in mathematics. And so in 1959, he came down and interviewed a bunch of people and brought them to Waterloo. And he also picked up a few people out of engineering physics to lecture as well, people who graduated about '57 or '58. And then in 1960, he came back again and I was one of the cohort and I thought I'd messed up that interview, but he phoned me up about a month after the interview and asked me if I wanted a job, and I said yes.
  • And the deal in those days was $250 a month to be a TA, free tuition, and the opportunity to do a master's degree which would take you roughly 8 to 12 months depending on how you did it. You could do it all by courses or you could do it by courses and thesis. I chose the course route. So that's basically how I got here. I -- when I first -- I'd never been to Waterloo. I'd been as close as Galt.
  • [ Laughter ] So when I -- my fiancé at the time, my wife of many, many years, and I drove down in March to check the place out. And, well, we drove up in front of the Waterloo Hotel and asked a person who, obviously a local, where the University of Waterloo was, and he'd never heard of the place. So, I asked him where Waterloo College was, which is now called Wilfrid Laurier and he knew what that was. It had been there for 50 years at that point. And so we drove up to the -- to that area and, of course, I believe the University of Waterloo was close to that area. So, we found it, and there we were, a building and a half, you know what I mean? In midst of a great big farmer's field really. And, of course, that -- at that point in time, an article appeared in The Globe and Mail about Waterloo and what have you and I don't remember the details of it, but my mother-in-law wondered where I was taking her daughter.
  • We were married on September the 10th, and I started work on September the 15th here in Waterloo. My wife got a job at what is now Grand River Hospital, but was KW Hospital. The silly part is we ended up in an apartment, which is right behind St. Mary's Hospital. So, after a year at Grand River or KW Hospital, she transferred, she moved over to St. Mary's. In those days, you could get a job, you know, just say, I want a job and they get -- and they threw it at you. So that's basically how I got started here. And I spent my year as a master's student. We got our -- we had a computer, an IBM 610 it was called, was sort of a temporary thing until we got the computer that the university had bought. And when we finally got it, another fellow and I sat down and figured out how to use it. So we taught ourselves how to use it. And then Ralph Stanton asked me if I'd like to help run the computing centre.
  • Wes Graham was going to be in charge of it and said, sure. And the -- I just went up to $450 a month. So I -- and a few weeks after that, I sort of thought, yeah, I'd like to get a PhD. And so, I went to Ralph and said, "I'd like to get a PhD." He said, "Well, wait a few weeks. We'll start a PhD program." So, I wasn't the first PhD in mathematics, but I was one of about three or four. That's how we started a PhD program and I, after a year or so, I became a lecturer in mathematics and taught engineers and then math students. And I finished my PhD in 1965 and became an assistant professor. In those days, you became assistant professor, you got tenure right away. And --
  • Anne Millar
    Did you know you were going to become a professor? Was that something?
  • Don Cowan
    No, if you asked me at any time in my life if I believed where I am now, I'd have laughed. Okay. No, I'd be -- I did -- I -- the whole academic life, I found really a lot of fun, if you will, and very interesting. But I had no ambition to be a professor when I started, you know, undergraduate degree. You know, I hadn't even thought about graduate school at that point. And then I was assistant professor for a year. And in 1966, we were starting to form the faculty of mathematics. I think we at that point by that time we had voted ourselves out of the faculty of arts and the faculty of mathematics was going to start on July 1st, '67, although they backdated it to January 1st now. And I'm walking down the hall one day and Wes Graham says to me, "Ralph wants to see you." And I thought, "Oh my God, what have I done wrong now?"
  • So I went to his office and the first thing he asked -- offered me was a seat. So I figure it couldn't be too bad. And in the next two minutes, he asked me if I'd like to become the chairman of the new computer science department. And it was a raise or promotion for me. Well, apart from the raise, the promotion, it was pretty exciting. I hadn’t a clue as what I was getting into, let's be frank about it. But I took on the job and immediately started trying to hire people. And say when I was the chair from '67 till '72, and we went from a department of three people to the department of 35, so.
  • Don Cowan
    Wow.
  • Anne Millar
    Wow.
  • Don Cowan
    Yes.
  • Anne Millar
    Yes.
  • Don Cowan
    Wow.
  • Anne Millar
    UCLA, Stanford, Berkeley, and Caltech, when you add all enrollment together, it's about half of Waterloo.
  • Don Cowan
    Oh, my goodness. I knew it had grown, but that really illustrates how much.
  • Anne Millar
    Yeah. And not only that -- it still takes 90% to get in. So, I mean, it's not as if we've lowered the standards or anything like that. Yeah. We have a pretty classy operation here, so.
  • Don Cowan
    Wow. Can I -- talk a little bit about what the early years were like for you there? I know you said you’d come and it's mostly this farmer's field. But I know it seems like it was a very close-knit community and people really supported each other.
  • Anne Millar
    Absolutely. I mean, everybody knew it. It was very collegial in the sense that, you know, we didn't always agree on everything. That was fine, but we could argue it out and do it. And if you did something that didn't work out, you wondered why, you pick up the phone or whatever and or just walk to their office and say, "You know, what the hell is going -- excuse me, what the hell is going on?" And ask the question and get it. And I think the university unfortunately has lost a lot of that collegiality, just partly through growth. I'd like to see it get it back. I mean, that's one of the things I keep beating on people about. My statement for the last 30 years is Waterloo is in danger of becoming a real university. And unfortunately, I think it succeeded -- -- but it -- yeah, it was very, very nice. I mean, at the very beginning, I remember three or four of the guys rented a house out near Baden, which -- and yeah, just out in the field someplace, we had a party and everybody came.
  • I mean, the students, the faculty, the staff, the whole bit.
  • Anne Millar
    Oh, wow. Well, that social life of the university, a lot of people speak to its importance.
  • Don Cowan
    Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, and we all knew each other, all the engineers. And, of course, you know, the -- you know, I -- people just, as I say, worked together. I did some computing work for the dean of engineering, Doug Wright at the time. And it was just, you know, it was just part of the game. I mean, early on -- -- I guess, four high school teachers set up a thing called the math contest. Like, I think they called them the District 10 because it was around the Orangeville area if I remember correctly. They're all good friends of mine. I mean, I've known them all for years. In fact, this -- and they asked Ralph Stanton and Ken Fryer to help them with the first paper. The idea was to make mathematics fun. Okay. To put a little bit of fun in it rather than just being boring.
  • Anne Millar
    A bit of pizazz.
  • Don Cowan
    Yeah. And so, they asked Stanton and Fryer to help them and Ralph put the paper together in 10 minutes, his usual thing. And then they the next year, Ralph brought it into the University of Waterloo. And it's the first contest where 300 kids wrote it. There are now 300,000.
  • Anne Millar
    Wow.
  • Don Cowan
    Wow.
  • And we would then schedule 200 at a time on a Saturday, and we'd break them into two groups and we'd give lectures, we'd show them how to write programs. We'd teach them programming in two 45-minute sessions. And then we’d give them a lecture on sort of what competing was all about and what careers there were at that time. And that lasted for about 30 years. We ran and -- we ran it in various forms. Obviously, as schools got computers, we changed the form somewhat and did new things. But of course, the fun story about that one is Wes and I had the idea and we went down to see Ralph Stanton and went to his office and said, "Ralph, we've got this great idea." And then Wes explained the idea to him. And Ralph looked at Wes and said, "That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard." Ten minutes later there's a knock. So we go back to Wes' office with our tails between our legs as they say.
  • And 10 minutes later there's a knock on Wes' door. And Ralph says, "Wesley, I've just had this great idea. Guess what?" Anyway, so I basically ran that for -- I mean, a funny story. There's a camp in -- up near Huntsville called Camp Tawingo. It's a kid's camp. My next-door neighbour in Waterloo here owned it, his son now owns it because he died a few years ago. He was a prof at Waterloo, his name was Jack Pierce. And we used to go up there on winter weekends, quite often and ski, to cross country ski. And one day we're there and there's a bunch of new people we hadn't seen before. And it's one of our friends goes over and introduces us all and said, and that's so and so and so, and you know, that's Ron Dunkley for Waterloo, and that's Don Cowan for -- he looks at him says, "You mean the, the D.D. Cowan?" The funny part is that's how I signed the letters. I invited him. He was a high school teacher, math high school teacher.
  • So anyway, those are just some of the crazy things that happened to us in the '60s and '70s. That is to say computer science days, the math contest, both big things. And, then of course, we automated the -- as the contest grew, we automated the marking of them because that became a big -- an issue. Of course, now it's -- I don't even know how they do it now, but obviously, it's highly automated.
  • Don Cowan
    Yes. So you're speaking a lot of how the university and its faculty members were really trying to connect with the community in so many ways.
  • Anne Millar
    Yeah. Particularly the high schools because -- and again, you may not want to write this down, but you know, most universities sort of ignored the high schools. They were just out there. They supplied the students. Okay. But whereas Stanton firmly believed in cultivating the students and cultivating the schools. And he reached out to them. We had -- every year we had a northern tour and they would visit high schools across the north. Not all of them. Each year they'd do a bunch. And you know Stanton would go, sometimes Ken Fryer would go, my friend Ron Dunkley would go. Jack Pierce who was in recreation and leisure studies would go and what have you. But it was called the Northern Tour. And, of course, Ken Fryer's favourite joke when he got to Wawa, he got there by car, car, not choo-choo.
  • [ Laughter ] So I think -- but they did that for years. Nobody ever went to a high school in Northern Ontario. No. You know, and we got some good people from those places. I mean, one of them was Jerry Lawless, just as an example. Jerry is a statistics prof, well, he's retired now. I haven't seen him in quite a while. But, you know, Jerry was -- came from Kirkland Lake. And, you know, he was a NHL-calibre hockey player too. He played for the Warriors. So -- but -- so, yeah. So the early days we were reaching out and we still do. I mean the Centre for Education in Mathematics and Computing, which we have now, CEMC, is -- has brought a lot of that stuff together in various ways. Of course, it's changed because the way we teach has changed, what we teach has changed, all the rest of it. But -- and, you know, but it -- and they now send people all over the world.
  • And the idea is they don't, let's say, I'm being -- they visit a high school in Indonesia and I mean, they've done this and they would walk into a school. They don't talk about the University of Waterloo. They just help the people with their mathematics. Okay. The people remember that they came from the University of Waterloo. So it, you know, it’s an incredible tool, so.
  • Don Cowan
    Yes. Oh, wow. Can you talk about the state of computer science when you were in your graduate studies and then as a young faculty member?
  • Anne Millar
    Well, Waterloo never had a vacuum tube computer permanently. We had one temporarily. We needed because we used to run what's, ah, what was it called? The business game where we'd bring people -- business people in and they'd play against the computer. And one day our computer went -- fell on its face for reasons because of somebody fed a deck of cards to it, but they forgot to take the elastic band off.
  • [ Laughter ] And -- but in general, we, you know, we went from -- -- very early transistor-based computers to, we had this IBM 1620 as it was called. And then about 1963, I think it was, the university acquired an IBM 7040, which was a million-dollar machine. And I always remember the president Gerry Hagey at the time, the first president of the university, walking down the hall. I think he had a visitor from Nigeria, if I remember correctly. And he, you know, just showing him around. I don't even know how many buildings we had. I guess we probably had a couple of engineering buildings by then. And he sort of came up to Wes Graham and I were standing chatting in the hall and he said, "Wesley, would you mind showing this gentleman our computers?" And Wes said, "Sure." He opened the door and Gerry looked in and said, "My God, we bought that?"
  • And Gerry wasn't known for swearing. Okay. So --
  • [ Laughter ] And then, of course, in -- so we moved along and as we became the math faculty, even though we weren't the math faculty yet, we now had to make plans for a math building. Okay. Which is of course the old math -- what's now the old math building on campus. It was opened in '68 by John Robards and Bill Davis. But part of it was a big room in the middle to hold a big computer. And we figured out what computer we wanted but we couldn't figure out how the hell to ask for it because it was 8 million bucks. And this is a $5 million building we're talking about. Okay. So, again, Wes Graham and I were sitting around trying to figure out how to do this. And the idea was could we sort of bury the request to a certain extent? Because we just asked for this big computer, let's face it, we're not likely to get it. So, he looked me in the face, you know, computer -- in those days, I should explain, if you -- if the university funded 10 cents, the government would give you 90 cents.
  • Okay. For an approved project. They had to approve the project. So -- and that included the furniture. So, Wes looked at me and said, "Well, computers are furniture, aren't they?" So we submitted a proposal for a $5 million building with $8 million worth of the furniture. And we got it.
  • Don Cowan
    Wow.
  • Anne Millar
    Wow.
  • Don Cowan
    Oh, wow.
  • Anne Millar
    Oh, wow.
  • Don Cowan
    Wow.
  • Anne Millar
    And so we in Waterloo had the Canada's largest computer. Now, there's a story and I don't -- I can't find out if it's true or not, but it floats around all the time. We were the back up to the NASA moonshot because NASA had the same computer as we did.
  • Don Cowan
    Oh, my goodness.
  • Anne Millar
    Yeah. I've dug around. Unfortunately, everybody who potentially knows the answer is dead. So, I can't ask them. And even then, their memories were a little dicey, so. Excuse me, I need a drink here.
  • Don Cowan
    Yes. I know. I have my water as well. That's wow. So, here's this really young university in many ways.
  • Anne Millar
    Well, when we put in the proposal for that, we were less than 5,000 students.
  • Don Cowan
    Wow.
  • Anne Millar
    And when we got it, we were about a little over 6. Because we were growing like crazy, engineering particularly and math, both were growing very, very quickly, you know, so.
  • Don Cowan
    What were the students like in the early days in mathematics?
  • Anne Millar
    Oh, all bright. I mean, how can I say this? I haven't taught for quite a long time now, but extremely bright students and -- very creative. I mean, one time we used to have -- well, there were four guys who -- four undergraduates students. We had this thing called WATFOR, which basically if you went to run a program on a computer, it would just -- if you wrote one statement, okay, stop, just to keep it simple, it would take 30 seconds for that program to translate and start to run. Well, okay. We were trying to run thousands of jobs a day. So you just recognize that you can't run thousands of jobs a day with those kinds of speeds. So the -- we actually had acquired some software from the University of Wisconsin, which helped to speed up that whole process quite a bit for our smaller computer.
  • And then the guys wanted to write -- four students wanted to write the same thing for a bigger computer, which it ended up being a thing we call WATFOR. And so, they wrote it, these four students, I think they were in third year at the time. They took three months in the summer and wrote the software. I didn't think it could be done. I was blown away when they did it. And naturally brilliant guys. Two of them went on to do PhDs. One of them is living in California. Well, he is retired now, but he was a -- worked for several big companies. Another one is retired here now. He worked for -- he was a prof at the University of Manitoba for many years. And then the other one ran a big company. Excuse me. So they were all very -- it was very, very successful. But the idea was they took it, what took 30 seconds and reduced it to a 10th of a second. Okay.
  • Anne Millar
    Wow.
  • Don Cowan
    And not only that, when you made an error in a program, you'd get a great big stack of paper, okay, which you -- you know, if you were teaching, first of all, the speed was a problem, but you get this big pile of paper. Well, the students couldn't figure it out and they'd be taking hours of a prof’s time to figure it out. So it was hopeless. So, they also produced -- the other part of this software was that they produced it so that it said, the mistake’s right here stupid. In other words, it pointed right at it. Okay. And described the error as well, you know. You’ve probably done this wrong or that wrong or you've done this. And so -- and this was a revolution at the time. And then when we got the -- so and it was called WATFOR. And then we wrote one called WATFIV. Now, that wasn't, you know, the IV was actually Latin 4. So, it's WATFOR, again, but what we call it WATFIV.
  • And then we had a bunch of different versions. So that was -- and then we got this large IBM machine, the 360 -- model 360, which was going all over the world. And we wrote -- again, Paul Dirksen and Paul Cress led the team that wrote WATFOR for the IBM 360. And we were, excuse me, at that point in time, we were distributing it to around the world. There were thousands of copies of it out there. And early on we were distributing. Wes Graham was going to give it away for free. And I argued that, no, that's a bad idea because how do we pay to fix it? Because there's going to be something wrong. Software always has errors. I mean, that's a guarantee. And so I convinced them. So we charged $300 one time for it and that was okay. But then we realized we didn't really have enough money coming in. So, we said to people, yeah, you can keep it, but now it's -- you have to pay us $300 a year.
  • Okay. Now in -- by comparison, the IBM equivalent software, which it wasn't as good, was $10,000 a year. Okay. So you're -- it's pretty obvious where people are going to go. Not only that, it solves their problems, teaching lots and lots of students. So that was -- that would put us -- really put us on the map. And we literally had thousands of people out there and all this money coming into the university, which we then used to build new software and also fix the stuff we'd already built, so. Yeah.
  • Anne Millar
    But what year was that around?
  • Don Cowan
    We started in '64, '65 I think it was. Sorry, '65. And it went on for -- from '65 to mid-'90s.
  • Anne Millar
    Oh, wow.
  • Don Cowan
    Oh, wow.
  • Anne Millar
    Yeah. Oh, wow. I was curious because you're this graduate student and you're trying to work in this new field at a very small university that presumably didn't have a lot of the infrastructure and things that you would've needed.
  • Don Cowan
    Oh, we did it ourselves, basically, you know. Well, when we first -- Wes and I first started, we, first of all, we offered a course to engineering students. He was the prof and I would -- I guess I was the teaching assistant or whatever. I don't remember now. But anyway, I helped. And, you know, we ran into all sorts of trouble. First of all, we asked the professors in engineering for problems for these guys to solve. Well, the profs came up with problems that were too damn hard to be doing. I mean, considering what we were trying to do. And then we were trying to, you know, take, well, this is the case, let's say, 50 to 75 students, I don't remember the exact number. Have them run their problems on the thing. Now, you know, you’re just used to sitting infront of a keyboard, but in those days we had long paper tape. We had cards which were 80 columns. You put your punched -- your program in a card, then you converted it to this paper tape, which then went into the computer.
  • Well, you can imagine the process. And people did all sorts of dumb things and it was pretty obvious it was not working. And that's when we sort of discovered these new ways. Kind of have to give credit to the University of Wisconsin. They came up with something for our specific computer, the IBM 1620, and then we actually improved their software and then went on to build the new stuff for the IBM 7040 and then the IBM 360/75, so.
  • Don Cowan
    Wow.
  • Anne Millar
    Yeah. And then -- so as the chairman of this kind of new department, what were your initial objectives? What were your initial goals?
  • Don Cowan
    Teach the students. Get enough people, that's it. Teach the warm body, so to speak. And in some sense, we were very lucky. The first guy I hired actually was from Norway. I met him at a school I was at in Edinburgh. I was there for three weeks. And another fellow I met, I offered him a job, but he didn't come here. But eventually ended up in Waterloo about 20 years later. And then one of my -- one day we got a -- I got a letter in the mail from a fellow by name of John Brzozowski. Now, John had finished his PhD, I think, about a year before I did. He's a little bit older than me and he was an associate prof at the University of Ottawa and he wasn't very happy. He wanted to move on. So he wrote to us and he wrote to Toronto that I know about. And he had a very good reputation. People already knew his work. And we brought him to Waterloo and gave a talk and we, you know, entertained him and all the good stuff.
  • And he went to Toronto, we beat them out. We got him. Because Toronto and Waterloo were going head-to-head. I mean, it was really, it was a lot of fun. And many of the people that I competed with became my good friends. But, boy, at times we hated each other's guts, if you know what I mean. Well, we're going after people. And then John, of course, knew a whole bunch of people. So he reached out and brought people and then we'd make tours. Excuse me, again.
  • Don Cowan
    No problem.
  • Anne Millar
    No problem.
  • Don Cowan
    You were recruiting, so both for faculty and for students --
  • Anne Millar
    Yeah. Well, yeah. One fellow his name is Johnny Wong. Now, Johnny, I mean, I'm pretty old, so these guys are all retired now. But Johnny came up to me at UCLA and said, "You know, I think I'd like to go to Canada. My sister lives in London." He was originally from Hong Kong if I remember correctly. And I said, "Well, you know, you talk to me." He said, "Okay. I'll give you a call." So when he’d finished his master's. He did a PhD and came to -- and then came to Waterloo. Another guy -- I went to the artificial intelligence lab at Stanford and I met a guy by the name of Ed Ashcroft. And I don't know what I did, but he came to Waterloo and been here for quite a long time. And we had a whole bunch of very good people. Pat Fisher was a connection with John Brzozowski, for instance. He was -- there's a whole group of people. And computer science at the beginning, people didn't know what the hell it was, to be honest with you.
  • I mean, typical question, could you help me fix my computer or my programing, you know?
  • [ Laughter ] But that wasn't really the name of the game. But it was very theoretical at the beginning. So, a lot of very good theory people, you know, that came in. So he brought a fellow named Pat Fisher and his wife came too. And they were both world-class computer scientists. So, again, you know, good luck, good judgment. But we ended up, as I said, a department of 35, all sorts of people.
  • Don Cowan
    Wow.
  • Anne Millar
    Wow.
  • Don Cowan
    And so, as you said, no one kind of knew what this was at the beginning. So then --
  • Anne Millar
    Well, there was a whole theoretical part, a mathematical part, if you like, like what is a computer? You know, I mean, I don't know if you've heard of what a thing called a Turing machine. Okay. Well, the Turing machine is effectively a model of a computer, a mathematical model of a computer. It's not a real model. It's a mathematical thing, you know. Well, that was the kind of thing people tended to be dealing with because they could write papers about it to be blunt. It's hard to write papers about a lot of the stuff we were doing because we didn't quite know what we were doing. We just were feeling our way.
  • Don Cowan
    Oh, wow. And what were you teaching your students to prepare them kind of in this new field?
  • Anne Millar
    Well, the first things we were teaching them was obviously programming, but we were also teaching them how to put data together to make it work better. We -- it's called Data Structures. And then, of course, it was not what I was teaching, but other people were teaching what's known as autonomous theory and all this kind of stuff where you're basically teaching people about the models of computers, the mathematical models, and whether -- and what computers can do and what they can't do. Because it, you know, there's things that are can't be computed. Okay. And there's a whole theory behind that’s primarily based on what -- on Turing's original work. So that was the kind of thing we were doing. And then one day, again, I don't know exactly how the conversation started, but we realized that we're sending all these co-op students out into the real world and they don't know anything about the real world.
  • So can we teach them something about business data processing? So, we actually, there’s a language called COBOL, which has been around for five years and still exists. And so, we wrote instead of WATFOR for WATerloo FORTRAN, we wrote WATBOL, Waterloo COBOL. And then we used it to teach the students. It was the same basic principle that is run the problem through as fast as you can and tell the people where their mistakes are as easily as you can. And we ran it through the -- we taught this business data processing for many, many years, wrote a textbook or two about it and all that sort of stuff. So that was the year -- actually that was started in 1969, 1970, we did that.
  • Anne Millar
    Okay. It's an interesting time period when you're looking at Waterloo because I -- and you've alluded to this a little bit, in that some of these programs then put Waterloo on the international map. Because it's something I've been trying to pinpoint is when did Waterloo really become known outside of Ontario, then outside of Canada, and to really become known as the university it is today?
  • Don Cowan
    Yeah. Well, there's various parts to it. When we started to build this software, okay, everybody had this problem how the -- excuse the expression, how the hell do we teach students? You know, because we've got this big machine, but, oh, my God, it's slow. You know, when, you know, we were running 25,000, 30,000, 50,000 programs a day at various points in time. I don't remember what exactly. I can't put those numbers down now, but, well, if you do the math, if you run 24 hours a day and you run one problem every 30 seconds, you're not going to be able to come even close. Okay. So the fact we solved the problem that everybody had put us on the map very early. Okay. We -- I mean, and then, so that was a very practical problem that we solved and we've been solving very versions of it for 40, 50 years.
  • And we developed various tools, you know. As the machines got smaller, we developed the tools for the smaller machines and did various things with them. So that -- so Waterloo came on the map pretty early, mid-'60s really. And, of course, it started with the 7040, but then we went to the 360, which everybody was buying, relatively speaking. It really exploded. You know, that didn't mean we were good at everything. It just meant, boy, we'd solved the big problem. Then, of course, we brought in, I'll call them the theory efficients, the computer scientists who were interested in the theory of computing, and we had some very good ones here at that time. And as a matter of fact, I got a call not too long ago from a fellow in England who was writing a history of some of this stuff and wanted to know, you know, about one specific prof that had been here, Ed Ashcroft. So, you know, I was able to enlighten them with what I remembered.
  • But so we kind of grew and now we're -- I know we're somewhere in between 10 and 20th in the world in terms of reputation. I, you know, we're number one in Canada. Well, we compete with UBC and U of T on those. Yeah.
  • Anne Millar
    What was the state of U of T's department? So were you kind of trying to model yourselves off of those examples or create something totally new?
  • Don Cowan
    No, we didn't model ourselves off after anybody. We did our own thing, in my opinion. Okay. Now, people may disagree with me but -- -- U of T's department, and I'm not criticizing them. I mean, a lot of them say are good friends of mine. And we used to fight over the bodies, so to speak. You know, somebody would come to the interview, they interviewed here, they’d interview U of T. Who got them? Sometimes U of T did, sometimes we did. And then people would move back and forth.
  • Anne Millar
    What brought -- I'm sorry to interrupt. What do you think convinced people to go to Waterloo in those early days?
  • Don Cowan
    That's a very good question. I think partly it's just the dynamics and the excitement of the place. Okay. And we had some -- we had very good students. We've always had good students. There's never been a, you know, I -- obviously there's always better and worse, but the incredibly good students on the average. And I think they liked the atmosphere. I think quite a few people actually came here eventually because of the intellectual property policy. But that was not until early '70s that that happened. And, you know, computer science was a new field. Nobody really knew what the hell they were doing, to be honest with you. We were, you know, we had an idea we were going to teach these kids about computers. I mean, the basic idea was to teach engineers, let's say, how do you use computers to solve problems?
  • Okay. Yeah. You know, if you're designing something, well, how do you run a -- how do you use a computer to help solve that design problem. It wasn't so much about computer science, per se, but we grew this computer science department. Again, you know, why did John Brzozowski come here rather than Toronto? Well, probably because I -- Toronto only offered him an associate professorship. I offered him a full professorship. Okay. I don't know. John and I never had that conversation. Unfortunately, he died a couple of years ago now, so I can't ask him. But -- -- and, you know, why did Pat -- Pat Fisher was a very well-known guy too. And, again, why did he come to Waterloo, you know?
  • [ Laughter ] Again, I think John, you know, John invited him and John was already a foundation of a little bit of a theoretical stuff. Yeah. Excuse me.
  • Anne Millar
    I wonder if there's this opportunity to kind of do something new, to be creative, to think outside the box that existed at the university.
  • Don Cowan
    Well, it definitely, it was there all along, you know. It -- in those days, '60s, '70, even the '80s, we thought outside the box in that sense. Yeah, no, I'm sure that was in people's heads to a certain extent that they could have an effect that, you know, I was -- I met with Pat Fisher's wife, Charlotte Froese Fisher. Charlotte is a very eminent computer scientist on her own right. I keep in touch with her. And one of the interesting things is, excuse me, Pat left here and went to Penn State, and then he went to Vanderbilt. And when I met her, oh, 5, 6, 7 years ago, now, she came up to Waterloo she said, "I don't know why we ever left." Okay. Because what has happened here, I mean. Again, I've got a whole bunch of articles and I don't know if you're interested in them or not, not about computer science per se, but just what's happened in this community, you know.
  • It's phenomenal. And for a whole bunch of different reasons. Although I believe the intellectual property policy was definitely one of the big ones.
  • Don Cowan
    Well, can you talk a little bit about that? About computer science specifically, but just you've been at the university for 60 years. So how did you watch that grow?
  • Anne Millar
    Well, I'll tell you how it started. Wes Graham and I were sitting in his office one day. In those days, people hadn't really created anything. I'll call them hard goods, you know, but they were all writing software like crazy, all thinking they'd get rich. Nobody had, but at that point. And, you know, I don't know, you created it. You know, we just got talking about creation and the idea that, excuse me, again, people, they put the effort into it. They found the funds to maybe do what needed to be done. They should own it. So, we carried that idea forward. Wes went to the president and, you know, some of the senior members of the university and pushed that idea forward. And it turned out to be absolutely the right way to go.
  • We're so almost unique in the world in that regard.
  • Anne Millar
    Yes.
  • Don Cowan
    And then, of course, it had all to be managed. I mean, and then that grew into quite an operation. But the whole idea of -- -- that policy is to say it came out of a conversation, which is often the way things happen. Computer science is the same idea. And if you think about it, the university has probably benefited more from that policy than if they had taken a share. The reason is, number one, imagine, you know, imagine you're an administrator and I come to you and say, "I’ve got this great idea." And you say, "Wonderful. University owns 25% or 50%, whatever, doesn't matter." Well, you as the administrator, I'm never going to see a nickel of that. So are you going to get excited about selling that? Well, I mean, you'll do your job. I don't mean to be critical, but whereas if I own all of it, I want to make it happen, you know?
  • And if you look at the Oxford English Dictionary example, okay, excuse me, the Oxford English Dictionary. When Doug Wright was president of the university, there used to be a gentleman who ran the buildings and grounds here called Mike Brooks. Mike was English. He eventually left Waterloo and went back to England. He became the manager of the Oxford Estates. Now, Oxford owns one hell of a pile of land. I don't know how much. And he discovered one day that Oxford University Press was thinking of computerizing the Oxford English Dictionary. So, he sent, I guess was a telex in those days to Doug Wright immediately, basically saying, Doug, Oxford University is thinking of computerizing the Oxford English Dictionary. Waterloo is interested. Get your ass over here. So Doug immediately hopped on a plane and went England and talked to them and convinced them they should look at Waterloo.
  • And then he got Wes Graham and sent him over to seal the deal. And then they came over here and started working with us. I was part of the original team. And then when Wes asked me one day if I'd like to take it on, and I had another big project already on the go, so I thought, which is stupid, I should have said yes, but I didn't.
  • [ Laughter ] So we found two people called Frank Tompa and Gaston Gonnet, who were on the project. And then once they got to a certain point, we had already set up a company called Watcom, which we set up in 1981. And maybe they, I don't know, maybe they could see that we were fairly successful, which we were, you know, modestly successful at that point in time. And they got the idea they should set up a company too, which they did. They called it OpenText, which is now Canada's largest software company and sits up on the North Campus of the University. So -- -- but if those guys had been constrained by the university, that might never have happened. So that -- and there's a lot of people, I mean, I can point at tons of people who have -- are doing various interesting things. And, of course, this area, this is now known as one of the top high-tech growth areas in the world, not just in Canada, in the world.
  • Don Cowan
    And so it wouldn’t, in your opinion, it wouldn't have happened without that policy?
  • Anne Millar
    Well, I think that certainly greased the wheels a lot. Now people -- I've heard people argue that, nah, it didn't have anything to do with it. Well, I disagree. You know, we set up a company called Watcom. It was the first software spinoff from the university. Another fellow set up – Savvas Chamberlain set up his company out of electrical engineering. It had to do with -- DALSA I had to think of the name for a second there. It had to do with these little devices that are inside your camera, basically, that take the light and convert it into an image. Okay. Called charged-couple devices. And he built that into a gazillion-dollar company. Okay. Well, if he'd had to argue with the university over all the details. It may never have happened.
  • Don Cowan
    Yes.
  • Anne Millar
    Yes.
  • Don Cowan
    I would like to get some more water, actually.
  • Anne Millar
    Yeah. I'll pause for one minute. Come on back.
  • Don Cowan
    And then -- Sorry, there's. So that, oh.
  • Anne Millar
    Sorry.
  • Don Cowan
    That's okay.
  • Anne Millar
    So you were talking about -- I just want to make sure you're okay. You don't have to rush because we have lots of time.
  • Don Cowan
    Oh, no. Wow. Let's say it's, you know, I've been at the university almost since the beginning, but not quite at the beginning, unfortunately. But it's been an incredibly exciting time and it still is because I'm -- I still have graduate students, and research money, and what have you. And I’ve also been very fortunate. I've been part of two very successful spinoffs, so.
  • Anne Millar
    Well, I'd love to know -- I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but I'd love to know about those spinoffs and your involvement in their founding and kind of, I guess, how you do -- how you did both. How you were an academic and then how you helped found both companies?
  • Don Cowan
    Well, the University of Waterloo first of all had a policy that allowed you to consult one day a week. So, yeah, that gave you some time, if you will. And, of course, we tended to work seven days a week anyway, just the way life went. Well, I need to back up a little bit because in 1974, there's a company called Digital Equipment Corporation. It no longer exists. You'll read about them in Ken's book or one of Ken's books. He came to Wes and said, "We'd like you to write WATFOR and WATBOL for our computers," which was a PDP-11 computer. And he said, "Sure. Just give the university the computer and we'll go to it." And they said, "Well, we aren't going to give the computer to the university."
  • Oh. Well, "Why not?" Well, in Canada in those days, if you gave a computer to one university, you'd have to give it to them all. Okay. So, you're talking about 50 computers, so to speak. So, Wes said, "Well, we'll take the computer, but, you know, how do we deal with it?" You know, first of all, yeah, well, they gave us a computer, but they didn't give us free maintenance. We had to find a place to put the computer. And now we had to write the software and find -- neither Wes nor I were in any position to write software. We had to hire a bunch of people. So, oh, my God. And anyway, so we set up an organization called WATFAC or the Waterloo Foundation for the Advancement of Computing. And -- -- it eventually became a charitable foundation. It started out as not-for-profit. It eventually became charitable, which was a terrible mistake, but that's another issue.
  • Because then you have to deal with the CRA too much. But -- -- and then said, you know, what are we -- how are we going to do this? Well, it turned out there was a new hot topic in programming called structured programming. So got the idea of putting together a course on structured programming. And in those days you could mail out brochures and people would see them and they'd land on their desk. So we sent out brochures and we got tons of people who wanted to take the course. So, we went to Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, can -- just in the Ontario, Quebec sort of corridor. And we didn't -- we paid our expenses, but we didn't take any money other than that. We made $200,000 in a year. Now, in those days, that was a lot of money.
  • Anne Millar
    Wow.
  • Don Cowan
    And then we -- -- what we did with that, we rented it was a building at the corner of University and Phillip in Waterloo, was a Bank of Montreal. And so we rented a room in there and we could -- because there was a room empty, and it turned out -- the foundation was set up by Wes Graham, Paul Dirksen, and myself. And there was a room available. It happened that Paul Dirksen father owned the building. So he rented the room to us. He -- we still had to pay for it, but he gave us a good deal. And then for working, we used doors on stacks of paper. Okay. The stacks of paper was the legs and the door the table top. And then we hired three or four people, Ian McPhee, Jack Schueler, Terry Wilkinson, I think Jim Welch. I have -- Fred Krieger was in there someplace to write the software.
  • And -- -- they did that. And we gradually -- and then we did like we did with the university. We actually made the software available for so much a year. And we accumulated enough money that we eventually bought the building and -- -- put -- oh, we had a whole lab in there. In fact, our research group, there was no room for it at the university. So we moved it over to this bank building until a data centre was built. Now, the guys -- three of the guys, Ian McPhee, Fred Krieger, and Jack Schueler wanted to move on. They wanted -- they thought they'd go to Toronto and get a job in a software company. And then Ian had the idea, talked to Wes about it, about setting up a company. And so, he said, "We’ll, set up a company basically called Watcom."
  • And Watcom created software for PCs. PCs had just come out then. We were playing around with microcomputers at that time. We had actually had -- we had bought an Apple Computer TRS-80, what used to be called a Trash-80, which is Radio Shack. And Commodore was offering three for the price of one. So we bought three of them. Then we wrote to each one of them and said, "We'd like to know what's inside. Could you send us a circuit diagrams?" And Commodore was the only one who sent us the circuit diagram. So, we ended up taking their computer and building another one inside it, which was much more powerful. So we built a thing called the Commodore SuperPET.
  • Anne Millar
    Wow.
  • Don Cowan
    And then we built a bunch of software for that. And then -- and we actually, we also had another problem. We had tons of terminals now, not computers, terminals, and we were going into age of the microcomputer. So, we took the computer that we put in the Commodore, SuperPET, put it in a box. It looked something like a popup toaster and we called it the microWAT. And we used that, connected it to the terminal. So, the terminal was the keyboard in the screen, then the computer behind it. We had a whole rack full of those in the university.
  • Anne Millar
    Wow.
  • Don Cowan
    And then about that time, and the microWAT, IBM was looking it as a candidate for the PC is, as the PC, but they chose something different. So I ended up with the PC and then -- -- we set up Watcom. And then Wes talked -- and we all became our own venture capitalists. We all threw in a bit of money into the pot, which -- and then Wes talked to the guy who ran the Commodore Company, Jack Tramiel. Yeah. And he talked him into a contract to build software for the -- so we built a whole pile of software for this computer. So Watcom started that way and then quickly moved into the PC world. And we were building all sorts of software all over the place. And then it moved into the language C and we were brought -- built the world's best C compiler and then the world's best C++ compiler.
  • And then Wes got a crazy idea one day that the small businesses needed databases. And so he was going to set up a consulting company to teach small businesses about databases. And somehow the guys he hired decided to build a database system and it became Watcom's -- and then Watcom bought the company and it became Watcoms' premier product.
  • Don Cowan
    Wow.
  • Anne Millar
    And then we sold the company in 1994 to a company called Powersoft, which then sold itself to Sybase, which then sold itself to a company called SAP, which has an operation on North Campus, so.
  • Don Cowan
    So, it must have been an exciting time.
  • Anne Millar
    Oh, it was crazy. And then we also created some other software. One of the guys in our group, somebody said something and he didn't believe them. So, he went out and proved them wrong. And he built a whole pile of software just basically showing texts and databases in the, I'll say a normal database. And then we turned that into a company called LivePage, which we sold in 2000 to a fellow by the name Bill Tatum. Bill ran a company called Janet Systems. Well, he -- we sold it to Janet Systems, not Bill, but -- and it eventually became part of Oracle and is still in town here.
  • Don Cowan
    Well, I'm curious about -- you mentioned the IP policy. But what do you think it is about, in addition to that, at the University of Waterloo that kind of encourages the creation of these spinoff companies? So, you said that one day off a week, of course, would have helped.
  • Anne Millar
    Well, okay, partly you own it. Okay. That IT policy definitely has got to have something to do with it because I don't have to do battle with the university administration over exploiting it, if you will, using it. However. Whatever. Exploiting is probably an ugly word, but. And I think that's a big, big part of it. And then, of course, it feeds on itself. People see other people, I'll say, having successes, and they say, "Oh, you know, why can't I do that?" I -- there's a company in town called Desire to Learn. I don't know if you're familiar with them. Well, the three guys who started it came to my office one day and just asked me what I thought. You know, I mean, I think by that time they had a piece of software and they -- that maybe had been working at Guelph or something. I don't know. We didn't have it working at Waterloo, that much I remember.
  • And I said, you know, you guys are young. Go for it. Well, now it's a billion-dollar company. I mean, I'm not claiming I had anything to do with it. That's not the issue. But the issue is that these people saw, "Hey, people are doing this. Why can't I do this?" And I think that's a lot of what it is now. You know, he can build a company. Why can't I build a company? And it's, you know, really taking off. You know, as I say, we have this company called ApplyBoard. I don't know if you've run across -- but basically, it helps foreign students come to, I'll say North American universities, not just Canadian universities. Again, I don't know. I can guess the details, but I don't know them. And, you know, these guys are all Waterloo grads. Again, it's a culture. It's grown. It's not something that we've consciously created. I wouldn't say that.
  • I mean, but I think the IP policy started. For instance, when we started Watcom, as far as I remember, and I could be wrong about this, there was only one other company. And that was Savvas Chamberlain's DALSA. I think he started a few months before we started Watcom. And, of course, Savvas has done extremely well. And then we had -- Watcom started up, and then OpenTech started up. Well, OpenTech, you know, it wasn't doing very well for a few years there. And then all of a sudden it got the right management and what have you, and off it took. And, of course, now it's humongous. I don't even know how big it is anymore. But it -- you know, they own companies all over the world. They have all sorts of products. Again, I --
  • Don Cowan
    So then you have these young students who see this and they -- that would inspire them further.
  • Anne Millar
    I think so and, you know, and faculty members. I mean, there's guys who develop stuff in their lab. You know, there is -- one group came to us and they have some kind of an ultrasound device that uses artificial intelligence to really, I'll say, enhance the image and it's portable. So, you know, it's -- you don't take the patient to the device. You take the device to the patient. And that's a big deal because, you know, it means you can just sell. It's just now a culture. I don't think, you know, it -- I think it builds on the IP policy. It was easy to do. A few people got it. A few people were successful. Not everybody is successful. Excuse me. And once we got it out, you know, it's sort of like the snowball running -- rolling down the hill. Once you started it, I think, and had enough momentum, then people -- now again, I may be totally out to lunch.
  • That's my view of it.
  • Anne Millar
    No, thank you. Because it is something that, as you said, is recognized or seen as the culture now of the university. So it's interesting to explore where those roots are and how that emerged.
  • Don Cowan
    And the culture here -- how can I say it? In this town, if you don't know somebody, you know somebody who knows them. Okay. I mean, everybody is fairly close. And so that helps, I think. We're not spread out. And again, I don't mean to criticize Toronto, but we're not spread all over a big city like Toronto. You know, going to downtown Kitchener, well, it's two steps and you're stepping on somebody who's building a company, so to speak. And then, of course, we built all sorts of structures that helped that. I mean, you know, certainly The Accelerator Centre, Communitech, Velocity, etcetera. Excuse me. They're all in place to help, makes things happen. And, you know, we still got a long way to go too. I think, you know, we don't have the crazy funders like they do in Silicon Valley, which may be a good thing.
  • Anne Millar
    Well, and speaking of funding too, you're talking about people who then also reinvest in the community. Like there's something about Waterloo that's interesting in terms of the region of Waterloo, but also the university in terms of its retention of people. So -- and you could maybe speak to this. Like why did you never leave Waterloo? What kept you there?
  • Don Cowan
    Well, I'll tell you a funny story. I don't know if you want to put it in writing, but. I would -- and I won't name the other place. Okay. But I was once told -- I was once offered a position, a good deal at another university. And I was actually on sabbatical in California at the time. And so I visited this other place. I came back and I got a letter offering me this job, you know. Remember those things called letters? And, oh my God, who -- I need to talk to somebody about this. I can't talk to -- I mean, I talked to my wife about it, but, you know, she's not in an academic position. So she wouldn't -- So I, I phoned up Ralph Stanton. I couldn't talk to Wes because I knew what Wes' answer would be. He would want me to stay because he and I were very close. We worked together a lot. We worked here for close to 40 years. And so, I phoned Ralph Stanton who was at the University of Manitoba at the time, and I told him the situation.
  • He made one simple comment, "Donald, don't be an idiot." Okay. In other words, he saw what was happening here. He saw it, you know, better than I did. I mean, and I value that piece of advice to this day.
  • Don Cowan
    Yeah. Oh, wow. And so what is it? If you can -- sometimes it's hard to communicate these things. But what is it that he saw? What was he, the growth of the university? The potential for it to do something different?
  • Anne Millar
    I'm not sure. He actually could tell you -- he's not alive any longer. So it would be difficult to. But I think he just saw what could happen and what we already had. You know, we had great programs. We were growing like crazy. I mean, we already had the biggest engineering school in the country. We had the biggest math program in the world.
  • Don Cowan
    This is like the early 1970s.
  • Anne Millar
    This is 1972.
  • Don Cowan
    1972.
  • Anne Millar
    Yeah. And -- -- he saw the potential. Now, you know, not trying to be flip. We could have messed it up, right? But fortunately, we were very free in the -- okay. Most universities, well, as I said to you earlier, you know, Waterloo is in danger of becoming a real university. By that, they have an incredible amount of administration and it's harder to get things done. I have a philosophy of life, which is very simple. It's easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission. Okay. And I mean, I don't do anything wrong. Okay. Don't misunderstand me. But if you -- if I ask somebody permission, what's the easiest answer? No. Okay. So you think it through and then you do it. And, you know, you might run into some problems. Sure, that's fine. But -- and I think that's -- that was part of the journey.
  • The crazy things we did, setting up this foundation in 1974. Well, setting up a company in 1981. Well, we had actually a company in 1979, but it wasn't going anywhere. I don't remember if -- and they say, so it was merged into this new company in Watcom. Yeah. So, it was just the opportunity to, it's an awful statement, do what you damn well please. Okay. And as long as --
  • Anne Millar
    To take risks too like you --
  • Don Cowan
    Yeah. Well, if you got to remember back in the '60s, -- -- often a risk is just somebody's perception of you, right? In other words, you’re thought of as an idiot because you did that, so to speak. Well, what can I say? Nobody paid any attention.
  • [ Laughter ]
  • Don Cowan
    Well, today we talk about the importance of taking risks and --
  • Anne Millar
    Well, yeah, exactly. And we're attuned to that. I mean, you know, I -- So, I think the idea like, we could just do things. We didn't -- we weren't being constrained. Yeah. I mean, the obvious constraints, but, you know, if you don't have money, you can't do it. But sometimes we do it without money. We just find a way to get around the fact that we didn't have money. I mean, this -- well, this whole foundation thing that I mentioned to you.
  • Don Cowan
    Sorry, you cut out there for a second.
  • Anne Millar
    Oh, I'm sorry. I'm okay now?
  • Don Cowan
    Yes. Okay. You just said --
  • Anne Millar
    This whole foundation thing. I mean, we took the computer out. Now, what are we -- how are we going to pay for it? How are we going to pay the people, you know? We, you know, drove all over the place. We had a van full of stuff and we drove to Montreal and rented a ballroom in a hotel and taught 200 or 300 people this stuff. And then we did the same thing in Toronto. We kept doing it because people kept asking us to do it. So, yeah. And I -- -- I can, I mean, we can do that kind of stuff today, in fact, because I'm already doing it. I'm often doing it. But it's a little harder because you have to deal with more people and what have you. And it's not as -- you know, the university isn't as collegial as it used to be. And, I mean, well, I can tell you another story.
  • In 19 -- let's see, '78, '79, I was on sabbatical. So 1979, I came back. SO Wes Graham and I were sitting in his office talking about -- -- the fact that students were leaving Waterloo and going to Toronto. Okay.
  • Anne Millar
    Was that after their undergrad?
  • Don Cowan
    Yeah. Typically, you know, we'd provide them with a wonderful education and then they'd leave town. Now they go to Kitchener. But we were wondering what we could do about that. So we actually came up with the idea of The Accelerator Centre -- -- 20 odd years before it happened. And we incorporated a company wholly owned --
  • Anne Millar
    Pardon me. Sorry. It's my phone. I thought I turned that off. My apologies.
  • Don Cowan
    Oh, no problem.
  • Anne Millar
    So you had this kind of idea. You knew that was a need for the community.
  • Don Cowan
    Yeah.
  • Anne Millar
    Yeah.
  • Don Cowan
    Yeah. Sorry, I just --
  • Anne Millar
    No, that's okay.
  • Don Cowan
    My poor brain going fuzzy here. So, we actually set up a wholly-owned company owned by the University of Waterloo, which was -- we called it Waterloo Software Application Centre. And the idea was we tried to create a form of The Accelerator Centre. It wasn't the same as it is now. We had no idea of a big building or anything like that. And, unfortunately, it fell on its face for some reasons that to this day are -- I don't understand. And -- but anyway, but we just did it. You know, we -- I mean, Wes and I were talking about this in his office. So, Wes said, "Well, let's go talk to Doug." Doug Wright, okay, the president. Okay. So he picks up the phone. Phone Doug's office and Doug, "Sure. Come on over." So we go over, and explained the idea, and he said, "Sounds like an interesting idea.
  • Why don't I get Tom and Bruce together?" Bruce Callaly [assumed spelling] and Tom Brzustowski, if I remember correctly, "Talk about it. So, well, let's meet again tomorrow." Okay. So we met again the next day. Within two days, we'd incorporated a company.
  • Don Cowan
    Wow.
  • Anne Millar
    And that was the kind of thing that happened. And, you know, I -- and it -- we had the kind of administration too that was very good and flexible. Doug Wright was particularly good. He -- you know, he was as crazy as we were, or not. And I mean that kindly because he's a good friend of mine. But --
  • Don Cowan
    He made things happen.
  • Anne Millar
    Yeah. Well, you know, or he made it easy to make things happen, if you will. You know, he wasn't always in a position to make things happen, but. So, and crazy things. And another time Wes Graham went to IBM Asia Pacific, okay, which basically was all the countries around, you know, Japan, Korea, etcetera etcetera. And talked them into putting together a -- -- seminar where we would teach people over there how to teach students using the gear we had now, which was a network called Janet and a whole bunch of software. And so we actually did that. We -- individuals would travel to various countries and -- -- excuse me, give these lectures and what have you. And, you know, I went to Tokyo and I gave -- my wife went with me and she saw Japan.
  • I saw Tokyo and I taught people how to use computers and stuff. And I don't mean taught. They knew how to use the computer. That wasn't the issue. The issue was to teach them a philosophy of how to do things, you know, which was teaching. So, and there was these crazy things happening all the time.
  • Anne Millar
    How did you keep up on the developments because the field was moving so quickly?
  • Don Cowan
    Well, you pick and choose. You have to be selective. It's -- you know, there's no way I can keep up with everything. And, I mean, these days what I rely on is my students to tell me things. And I have two postdocs, I think it's five or six graduate students, and a research professor working with me. I probably should retire one of these days, but I don't want to. And, you know, they challenge me all the time. And because of the position I'm in, in terms of having been in the business for a long time, I have a good overview. You know, for instance, people mumble on about artificial intelligence. Well, it's called pattern matching is what it is. Okay. You know, and then people talk about quantum cryptography and all that sort of stuff. Well, how can we build software systems to take advantage of it?
  • That's some of the things we're working on right now, as a matter of fact. But, yeah. No, it's -- you can't keep on top of all this stuff. There's so many interesting things going on and so many things that, how can I say this, I think are experimental. That is, they work, but nobody really knows why. You know, for instance, I don't know if you follow artificial intelligence stuff at all, but there -- you -- now, you know, there's a piece of software out there, what they're called DALL-E 2 or something where you can talk to it, you can describe the picture, and it will produce something.
  • Don Cowan
    That's amazing.
  • Anne Millar
    And it's pretty good. And you can analyse text like crazy now, you know, all sorts of good stuff and -- but --
  • Don Cowan
    That's amazing. Can I get some of your thoughts just specifically on, or more of your thoughts, I suppose specifically on Waterloo, so the University of Waterloo rather. So what -- like what is it about the computer science program now that differentiates it? What makes it unique?
  • Anne Millar
    We're probably all teaching roughly the same thing. I mean, we were one of the early promoters of the curriculum, but I'm sure the curriculum has changed quite a bit since we pushed it. Co-op is definitely one thing that makes us unique. I think another thing is our connection to the high schools. We still reach out to the high schools and in various ways. For instance, we have the math, excuse me, the math contest. That's one way we're reaching out. We have the whole Centre for Education in Mathematics and Computing, which has a huge suite of materials that teachers can use to teach. And particularly during COVID times, they evidently made a lot of use of this stuff. So that's another thing. Another thing we do, and we haven't done it for a year or so for this COVID stuff, but every year we have a banquet where we recognize, I'll say the top three, it may be four, it may be two, it depends on the year, teachers, primarily in Ontario, but not just in Ontario.
  • That is, it could go beyond Ontario and we call them Descartes fellows after Renée Descartes. Excuse me. And the -- so those people become our ambassadors. They reach out. And we -- and, of course, now we've got tons of teachers out there who learned at Waterloo. You know, I mean, one aspect of this whole program is -- -- that -- sorry, excuse me.
  • Anne Millar
    No, it's okay.
  • Don Cowan
    It is the number of math teachers who are Waterloo grads now.
  • Anne Millar
    Yeah.
  • Don Cowan
    Yeah.
  • Excuse me. His -- guess what? His son is coming to Waterloo and his son has taken all our math contests and yet he lives in South Africa. Well, he doesn't anymore. He now lives in Waterloo, but.
  • Don Cowan
    Wow. Well, this community that really does --
  • Anne Millar
    Yeah.
  • Don Cowan
    Yeah.
  • Anne Millar
    Well, you have to remember, I'm out of touch in the sense of I haven't taught for 26 years. Okay.
  • Don Cowan
    Yeah. Then I guess maybe has the program -- did the program at one point in your time at Waterloo take a direction that you weren't in support of, or [multiple speakers]?
  • Anne Millar
    Well, there was one time a prof, who shall remain nameless, proposed, rather than teaching programming in first year, we should teach Word processing and spreadsheets. Now, okay, remember this is 40 years ago. Okay. We're talking about, okay, so we're in a different era. And I thought he was out of his gourd. He's a good friend of mine. Okay. I still think he's out of his gourd on that one. Of course, we've reverted back to proper programming, what have you, and went -- you know, lasted about two or three years because students weren't prepared for their business jobs. Okay. But I do think co-op is an -- you know, it is one of the big differentiators and it -- Waterloo started with co-op. So, you know, I mean, its first engineers were co-op students.
  • Don Cowan
    Yes. So what -- for a typical kind of math student or computer science student, when they come in to do a co-op, what are they thinking of? What are they kind of anticipating getting involved in? Or what are their hopes?
  • Anne Millar
    Well, I think it's a little hard to say. Some of them are interested in software development. But we also have math and business. Okay. So, which was invented by Arthur Beaumont, basically, who was the associate dean quite a few years ago now. And the idea of math and business. Wow. You know. So they -- again, they may get into accounting and all sorts of stuff, and they've done extremely well for themselves. I think you'll find one of them is the CEO of the Royal Bank of Canada, David McKay. He's a Waterloo grad.
  • Don Cowan
    Wow.
  • Anne Millar
    Wow.
  • Don Cowan
    At Waterloo, yes.
  • Anne Millar
    We're willing to experiment too. But, you know, we're becoming a little more staid and -- -- as, what can say, again, we're in danger of becoming a real university, you know. Some -- it's harder to make decisions because there's more people involved. You know, computer science, I don't know, there's 100 faculty members or something like that. It's a huge, huge operation. And to say when you -- But I think, you know, people come here. I think a lot of people like the community too, you know, apart from -- because it's still small. You know, I mean, if I want to walk, -- well, I can walk to the office. I'm only three blocks away, but I can also walk downtown Waterloo. And so I think it's a small community and it -- you know, people like that aspect of it. And, again, I think profs are fairly open here, you know.
  • When I was an undergrad, I rarely talked to a prof. Here, it's much more open and they try to make it congenial for the students. You know, they have events of various kinds, you know, meet your prof, play games with your prof, whatever. I mean, that kind of stuff. So I think that there's a whole culture that's kind of used to being in people's -- -- working with people. So, yeah.
  • Anne Millar
    If you were to kind of cast your thoughts forward to the university centennial, so I know we're still a few years away, but I know what the university would be like, you know, at 100. What would you hope for the university then?
  • Don Cowan
    Oh, my. One thing I would hope for, and I may -- it may be impossible, but it's more collegiality. Okay. It's -- I mean, I can think of examples where -- how can I say this? And I'll keep it simple. I filled out a form for something and they reject my request. Okay. I have no one to -- I can’t phone up and say, well, why did that happen? What did I do? Because it maybe I just said the wrong thing. If I'd said it a different way, the request would've been satisfied, so. And to me, that's something that's missing. I mean, I could -- -- up until -- I'm not quite sure when I'd say, but it was pretty open. Now, I can chat with the President of the University and, you know, I have chatted with him quite a few times. But it's -- there's a lot of faceless people buried in the administration particularly.
  • You know, a classic one here is fillling out expense accounts. People -- I mean, people are just -- I've seen -- I don't fill them out. I pay my own way. To hell with it. I can't bother. I know that's -- but I've seen comments from people and it's just awful. So, and there's no way to fix it, if you know what I mean. So that's one big thing I'd love to see. As far as, you know, -- -- academically I'd like -- -- I don't know if we want a medical school. I think -- but I think -- and this is an interest of mine, as a matter of fact, I think integration of the healthcare delivery system with the university would be a very good thing because there’s a lot of people who could --
  • -- solve their problems if they only knew what the problems were. For instance, I have a friend, a doctor friend, he's a physiatrist or rehab physician. And, you know, he deals with people who wear prosthesis, for instance, on the end of their leg. And if you put too much pressure on the prosthesis, you'll damage the tissue. So he'd love it if people could feel the pressure. In other words, they could feel the bottom of their foot. So, he said to a couple of Waterloo engineers one day, "You know, it'd be great if these guys could feel the bottom of their foot." And they looked at him and said, "It's trivial." And they have since got six patents and a device which is being passed all over the place. And if you think about it, it is trivial. Imagine if you wore a prosthesis and I put a stone in your sock. Would you feel it? So what if I put a sensor in there instead that gave you an electric shock and the shock intensity was proportional to how much pressure you're putting on it.
  • Now, I'm not saying it would be a shock, but you get the idea.
  • Don Cowan
    Yes. Something.
  • Anne Millar
    And so -- and there's a lot of smart people out there, and a lot of people with problems. We want to bring them together. And healthcare is a prime target for that. Now, you're getting me off on one of my favourite topics. So it's something I'm very involved with. I with few other people, we run a company called Waterloo MedTech, which is a not-for-profit, which is interested in innovation in healthcare.
  • Don Cowan
    Oh, wow. When did you found that?
  • Anne Millar
    We found it about 2017, but it's been in operation in one form or another since 2013.
  • Don Cowan
    Oh, wow.
  • Anne Millar
    And so that's -- you know. I'd like to see that kind of thing. You know, we have people who deal with health in the university, but -- and we have people who deliver health in the community. They don't really talk to each other.
  • Don Cowan
    Yes, to connect to them. Well, not --
  • Anne Millar
    Well, healthcare is special in the sense of many life experiences, I look at and say, gee, they could do it better and here's a better way. I may be wrong, but there's a good chance I can identify it. But I don't know what the problems are in healthcare yet. Now, I happen to a little bit because I studied it, but in general, so.
  • Don Cowan
    Yes. Would you say that about your personality in general that you can see where there are areas for improvement or how problems can be solved?
  • Anne Millar
    Unfortunately, yes.
  • [ Laughter ] But, yeah.
  • Anne Millar
    Well, it's probably one thing that's made you so successful.
  • Don Cowan
    What? I'm sorry, I didn't hear you.
  • Anne Millar
    I would think it would be something that has made you very successful because you're asking questions that maybe other people aren't asking or seeing solutions where others don't see them.
  • Don Cowan
    Yeah. I don't know if it's made successful, but it bugs the hell out of me. But I can't, you know, I can't see why something is the way it is. Yeah. The -- so, I mean, those are two things I would like to see. How could we retain collegiality in a large organization in effect, you know?
  • Anne Millar
    Yes.
  • Don Cowan
    Yes.
  • Anne Millar
    Yes. I was going to ask you, is it just about the size? Like, do you think the size is the main factor? Or is there a step that a large institution could take to improve it?
  • Don Cowan
    I think there is. I'm not sure what it is. Partly -- it's partly attitude. It's partly you can hide behind things if you want. You know, there's -- let's say it's very easy to ignore a problem if you want to. And however, if you see that person every day, it's very hard to -- you know, they'll be a royal pain in the backside until you deal with it. And I, you know -- -- I've been working on the president a little bit that way because he's putting out this Waterloo at 100. I don't think I'll be around to see it, although it'd be fun. So.
  • Anne Millar
    That's one of the reasons for the question is just -- is, you know, there is this effort and initiative to really focus what the university is doing. So I was curious about your perspective. What about computer science in particular? What would you like for that field in the next 35 years?
  • Don Cowan
    Well, I'm very concerned about artificial intelligence -- -- and the apparent lack of -- -- caring about its consequences. I'll call it the ethics of artificial intelligence. Some people are worrying about it. I'm not saying I'm alone in that but, you know, they're doing all these neat things, but, oh my God, what -- Look down the road. What are you doing to people? For instance, a part of it had to do with -- -- things where they train these systems. They use training data and I'm not trying to be flip. They're very good at recognizing white faces, but they aren't very good at recognizing Black faces. And that makes a lot of sense for a lot of reasons. Okay. Because the light reflection is quite different. You know, but those are -- and this whole idea of being able to tell somebody to paint a picture and it paints a picture for you.
  • Well, you know, what does that mean? Somebody actually just won a prize for that? They actually got a piece of software. I don't know the details, but it paints a picture. And so I'm worried about the ethical consequences of computation in general. Artificial intelligence being the one that sticks out the most. Now, people -- let me just say people aren't ignoring it. There are people thinking about that, but, -- -- you know, where should we go? What can I say? We invented the atomic bomb, but then we created a whole structure to try and keep it under control. Should we have invented the damn thing in the first place? That's a very interesting question. And I don't know, so.
  • Don Cowan
    When do you remember these conversations first appearing? So in particular about computers where people talked about the ethics and really kind of maybe the dangers?
  • Anne Millar
    At least, I'd say in the last decade they've been appearing more than they -- you know, all of a sudden, we can do things that we couldn't do before. Somehow, they've managed to tweak the technology enough that we appear to be able to do things and get reasonable results. And they've suddenly started to think about, oh my God, we can do that. What else can we do? And, of course, you know, facial recognition is a classic one. They've been pursuing that for -- So very much. We're, in some sense, we need -- in computer science specifically, and I mean, it's engineering, too. Not to -- we need to develop an ethical perspective to go along with our technology. If you build another bridge, a better bridge, okay. I'm okay with that. But if you build something that recognizes people, now, you know, what can I say?
  • There're certain groups in this world that are going to do it anyway. But could we have a structure? So those are a couple of things. I'd like to see the -- -- We got it to a certain extent, but I'd like to see the arts more into technology, both as a reminder of our social responsibilities, as you will. And also could they use technology more effectively to -- -- manage their own problems. I also get the feeling that we're not really using the collective mind of the university as well as we could. You know, we could get people more focussed on things because everybody comes at everything from a different point of view.
  • There's no question about that.
  • Don Cowan
    Yes. So, you'd be one certainly for working together and promoting kind of across -- like across different fields and different specialties. Yes. If you could introduce any new program, what would you introduce?
  • Anne Millar
    Oh my god.
  • [ Laughter ] Well that's a -- boy. I guess -- -- what can I say? I'd call it bringing healthcare into the 21st century because I don't think it is. I think we -- you know. There's so much we can do that we're not doing, I want to say. I give you that. One example of hitting the bottom of your foot, but there's another one. In other words, could we – We’ve got smart people out there and some smart people are delivering services and other people are thinking about them. Can we bring them together? There's -- we have the program called the MBET, Master of Business, Entrepreneurship and Technology, and it's a bit like that.
  • But I find -- -- well, to use this casual phrase, a lot of people are inventing solutions in search of problems as opposed to solving problems. Is there a way we can identify real problems that need to be solved? And -- -- can we take a more integrated approach? For instance, I go back to healthcare, but not just healthcare, but could I take, I'll call them an innovator, for lack of a better word. Could I put them in an operating room and watch what goes on? Because I'm sure they can come up with 10 good ideas. There's another story about a guy. I don't know if I've ever met him, but he went into a hospital ward and observed the nurses working. And then he went to the administration and said, "How many WSIB claims?"
  • You know, in other words, "How many compensation claims do you have for nurses?" And it was huge.
  • Anne Millar
    Wow.
  • Don Cowan
    And he -- what he'd recognized was that they were bending over too damn much and that if he redesigned the hospital bed, it would change the whole thing. So, he did. And I believe he's got a successful company, although I haven't followed it. So, another one where my friend, the doctor I was telling you about, he gave a class or he gave a lecture to the biomed students on -- -- vasculopathy -- basically, you can't feel things. Okay. You know, you -- somebody sticks a pin in your foot, you don't feel it. And peripheral neuropathy. That's it. Sorry. Anyway, he gave this lecture and he told the kids all about it. And he left. Months later, the prof who was running the program followed him up and said, "You got to come and see this." The kids had developed a device that would allow people to feel pressure in effect.
  • They would -- they had solved, in some sense, the peripheral neuropathy problem.
  • Don Cowan
    Wow.
  • Anne Millar
    You know, and we need to integrate people. And there's been attempts at it. I mean, oh God, what's it called? Knowledge Integration, I think is a program that we have at the university. And I know nothing about it because it happened relatively late in my career and I just haven't taken the time to follow it. But we're not -- we're getting some of the right people together, but we're -- it's a whole process. So, I guess, you know, really to get down to it, how do we bring all these smart people together, the ones with problems and the ones with potential to create solutions, so?
  • Don Cowan
    Yes. I like that, how we get them together.
  • Anne Millar
    Yeah, because -- and that's this thing that I told you about Waterloo MedTech that we're set up. That's what it's trying to do actually. I don't know if we'll be successful. But you can almost think of it like somebody says, "I want to innovate in Field X." Okay. So could you go to a concierge who would say, "Well, I happen to know somebody in Field X that you should talk to." You know, it doesn't matter. And, you know, say we're trying to focus on healthcare because that's a biggie.
  • Don Cowan
    But it's building the connections that otherwise wouldn't be naturally found.
  • Anne Millar
    That's right. Yeah. That's right. It's almost like a -- you know, Waterloo did, to me, a brilliant thing at the beginning. They -- when they started co-op education, they built a department to manage it. And that was absolutely critical because many universities have co-op education, but they expect the profs to manage it. Well, forget it. It ain’t going to happen. Could we have an integration department where you could go? Think of it as a concierge service. You know, when you go to a concierge service and say, "Tell me about a good restaurant." Well, tell me about a healthcare professional or an environmental person. I mean, God, there's tons of environmental problems out there that need to be solved. And -- -- I've worked in the environmental area too.
  • I mean one consultant who shall remain nameless, he got us to work on a whole bunch of software. And these people understood the problem they were solving, but they didn't understand how to write software worth a damn. Okay. And they were making terrible mistakes. For instance, you've heard this whole thing say about a butterfly flaps its wings in Japan and you have a tornado in Kansas. That kind of idea. Well, that happens in computers a lot whereas a very small error will blow up into your face and you won't know it and you'll get the answer. So, there's all these kinds of things and, you know, and I see it happening all the time. And they're not stupid people. It's just that they just -- things they just don't know.
  • Anne Millar
    Oh. And that's part of it, right, is recognizing what you do know and what you need help with.
  • Don Cowan
    And that's why I think like -- and, again, I use the word concierge service where could go to somebody and say, "Do you know anybody who -- " You know, and it's almost -- say, it's almost like a co-op education service in the sense that you go in there and you say, "Well, I'm interested in the chemical industry. Who are the coordinators for the chemical industry?"
  • Anne Millar
    Yes.
  • Don Cowan
    Yes.
  • Anne Millar
    Yes.
  • Don Cowan
    Yeah. You're getting me going actually. I just -- I think you just generated a damn good idea.
  • [ Laughter ]
  • Don Cowan
    That's what -- I think you alluded to this, is that one of the beautiful things about Waterloo in its beginning was what could come from a conversation? What could come from a discussion that, you know, around ideas, or community, or people?
  • Anne Millar
    Yeah. Well, you know, we -- for instance, we have these institutes, artificial intelligence institutes. I don't know them all. You know, a gazillion of them now. And they're good, but they still are too focussed. You know, they don't have people coming in and saying -- what can I say? An artist coming in and saying, "How could I use this to produce the Mona Lisa, so to speak? I’m being flip, but.
  • Don Cowan
    Yes.
  • Anne Millar
    Yes.
  • Don Cowan
    Well, I know we're almost running out of time. So I would just -- I guess, a couple of follow-ups and a little bit more about what we're trying to do at the university. So do you have anyone that you would recommend we interview for the project? That would be my first question.
  • Anne Millar
    Oh, boy. Well, most of them haven't been around that long. You might want to talk to Ian Munro. Ian is in computer science and he's now -- he's been at the university about -- since about 1972. And he may have some interesting perspectives that I haven't thought of. Frank Tompa would be another one. He is one of the two guys behind the Oxford English Dictionary project. And, you know, say they -- I approached the two of them at a party and they convinced him to take it on. Who else? Oh, so many of the people I can think of are no longer with us.
  • Don Cowan
    Yes. That's so -- that's unfortunate. Could I ask how important you believe these stories are? So to record stories such as yours and stories of people at the university for future generations?
  • Anne Millar
    Well, I think it's -- first, I live the history, so I think it's important, right? Sorry, that's a, you know. And I watched this place as they grew from -- well, it was a building and a half when I first saw it to what it is today, which is humongous. And I just think it's important to have these things recorded in the sense of being able to look back and understanding where it came from. And the thing is to -- I mean, there are two things I guess that I would love to see now is, of course, the collegiality and the, I'll call it knowledge integration, for lack of a better word. Knowledge innovation might be a better word than integration because integration doesn't sound like you're doing anything new necessarily. You're just taking old stuff and throwing it in the same basket.
  • But -- so I think it is important to record it.
  • Anne Millar
    Well, I assume -- I mean, I know David Johnson arrived here in 1999. Okay. But it would be interesting to get his perspective on things. Obviously, he can't talk about the early years at all. I'm just trying to think of who else is around. You know, the engineering class. Oh, I know. Paul Coke. Paul is in Ottawa and he was either in the first or second engineering class. I can't remember. He and I have been good friends for years. And as far as I know, he's still with us. So, I haven't talked to him for several months, but I used to. We'd chat back and forth once in a while.
  • Don Cowan
    Oh, nice. Well, thank you so much for the recommendations. Can I -- is there anything we missed in terms of what you would like to speak of your experience at Waterloo?
  • Anne Millar
    Oh my. I'm sure there is, but I can't think of it right now. Well, you have my -- you have that memoir that I wrote?
  • Don Cowan
    Yes.
  • Anne Millar
    Yes.
  • Don Cowan
    Yeah. Can I ask you about that? Because I did have a question. Did that begin when you were a consultant to the graduate program? Is that how you first started?
  • Anne Millar
    Well, they -- actually, it's before then. Wes Graham did a tour of Latin America where he talked about Waterloo. IBM sponsored it. And he stopped in Rio and they'd just been given a computer the same as the one we had. And so, they asked after Wes came back, if they could send people from Brazil to Waterloo to be trained. So they came up here in 1967 and again at '68. And one of the guys who came up asked -- said to me, "You know, I'd like to do a master's degree." And I said, "Well take a few courses and we'll do it by remote control." So he did his master's degree on remote control. His name is Carlos José Pereira de Lucena. And he's still working down there. And other people. I'd say most of them retired. But it's a Pontifical Catholic University was the foundation of it. And then we got a bunch of money out of CITA and we ran a program for 10 years where we bought people from Brazil to Waterloo for PhDs and sent people to Brazil to teach in their place.
  • Don Cowan
    Wow.
  • Anne Millar
    Wow.
  • Don Cowan
    No, I had it on my list and sometimes the conversations go a different way.
  • Anne Millar
    Oh, yeah. No. So, yeah, and they say I still work with them. And in fact, we're working on a couple of projects right now.
  • Don Cowan
    Can you talk about the impact of programs such as that and going to kind of other places in the world? How important is that for Waterloo?
  • Anne Millar
    Sorry. Say that again. I'm not quite sure I followed you.
  • Don Cowan
    Sorry. The impact of programs such as that, so supporting universities in other countries, bringing their students here to be trained. How does that impact the community of the university?
  • Anne Millar
    Oh, it's -- well, I -- okay. We've got people from all over Latin America. Okay. We've got people in Mexico, people in Chile, people in Venezuela, and Brazil has been the premier one. It's huge. Well, okay, I mentioned I have two postdocs, five graduate students, one master's, and four or five, I think it's six, five PhDs. They're all Brazilian.
  • Don Cowan
    Wow.
  • Anne Millar
    And there's a huge Brazilian community in this town.
  • Don Cowan
    Okay. Wow.
  • Anne Millar
    Yeah. The fact is the sons of two of the originals live in Waterloo.
  • Don Cowan
    Wow.
  • Anne Millar
    Wow.
  • Don Cowan
    Wow. So have you been conscious throughout your career of the impact you were having?
  • Anne Millar
    No. I just do it. Have fun.
  • Don Cowan
    Because I was writing -- you know, I was writing down and reading. I did read some of your memoir. It was great. I would -- Well, I read the, I love the early years things, which is why I didn't talk too much about your early years here because you did such a good job --
  • Anne Millar
    Oh, thank you.
  • Don Cowan
    -- writing about that there. And I would like -- I'm hoping that we could maybe take a copy of it and put it in your file at the archive.
  • Anne Millar
    Yeah. We also had a very strong connection with Italy too, IBM Italy. And we had a professor here by the name Bruno Forte. Bruno was -- he came to Waterloo and built the whole connection. We used to have visitors come. We'd have groups of visitors, professors from various countries or regions come to Waterloo, IBM sponsors, and then some of them would end up coming back in various ways. Bruno was one of those, for example.
  • Don Cowan
    Oh, wow. And you mentioned IBM. So I should have you speak to that a little bit just about the importance of that relationship for the university.
  • Anne Millar
    Oh, IBM was incredible. I mean, at one point in time, the University of Waterloo used to appear in the IBM annual report every year. You know, not trying to be flip. We were selling a hell of a lot of computers for them because we were building the software that the students needed. I mean, it wasn't our intention to sell IBM machines. That's just the way it worked. But, you know, and the machine we got was an IBM machine. We also sold a lot of digital equipment computers once we built the software for those too. So, but IBM took us all over the world. I mean, Wes Graham toured Latin America. I went to Latin America two or three times under IBM's sponsorship. Once to Venezuela and once to Rio, Brazil. I've been to Brazil many, many times, but this is quite simple. Well, I went to Japan for -- with IBM. Went to Italy. Seen most of Italy courtesy of IBM. You know, one day I got -- I worked for IBM's research for one year on a sabbatical.
  • I got a phone call one day for my friend Luciano [inaudible] in IBM Italy, saying, "Hey, Don, you want to come to Florence for the weekend? I want you to give a talk." "Sure." So my wife and I travelled down to Florence and spent the time with them.
  • Anne Millar
    Certainly not a hardship, is it?
  • Don Cowan
    Oh, no. I mean, you know, IBM treated us very well and they hugely benefited from this. We got all sorts of -- we got quite a lot of free gear from them as well as blank stuff too. We had a whole lab full of free stuff that we had a friend in IBM who would go down the assembly line and what he called yellow stripe equipment, which basically meant it was defective, and then he'd send it to us. Yeah. So, yeah, I know the IBM relationship was very good, as I say. Well, I toured Europe in 1968. I went to England, and then over to the Netherlands, and Germany, and Switzerland. I was supposed to go to Paris, but the students were rioting. So we decided it was a bad idea. And, yeah. And, you know, they've probably say we had an incredible run. Yeah. No. The relationship with IBM was very good. Now, of course, they've changed as a company. They don't make computers anymore. So the relationship is totally different now.
  • Anne Millar
    Yes. Well, are there -- I'm sorry I kept you a little over time.
  • Don Cowan
    No. It's wonderful.
  • Anne Millar
    And any final thoughts that you might like to share? And as you said, I can follow up.
  • Don Cowan
    I can't think of anything. I mean, I'm sure there's 100 things, but I can't think of anything. But I mean, if you want to chat some more at any time, I'm glad to do it. You know, I think capturing the history is a really good idea just because this place is unique. There were other universities in Ontario that grew up at the same time, but they haven't done what this place has done. This had the right combination of leadership at the right time. And I'll say this, and the upper, upper management of the university had enough brains to keep their hands off. They let these people like Stanton and Wright go with it. And they did a brilliant job of building the foundation for this place, so.
  • Anne Millar
    That's a beautiful final thought. Thank you so much, Dr. Cowan.