I began my university education in Astrophysics at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. However, probably thanks to the incredibly boring first year course in astronomy on one hand and the PDP-11s at my disposal in the computer labs (so-called QUICs; ‘Queen’s University Interactive Computing’) I caught the hacker bug and decided to switch into the computer-math programme.
My father would have none of it, until his colleagues at the school where he taught told him that this was the field to get involved in. This changed his response completely, into ‘you have no choice—you’re going into computing, and so you’re going to Waterloo University!’ We young people didn’t get a vote in those days; I mean, what did it matter that it was our lives which would be irreversibly affected ….
And so off I went in the fall of 1979, to the University of Waterloo, from which I graduated in 1984. What happened in between is a story for another time.