about

Eric Waddell

An early geek, Eric took Computer Science in High School. The year was 1967 and the school couldn't afford a computer, so the teacher arranged to have the students keypunch their programs at Ford of Canada and run them at McMaster University. The first assignment was to build a Random Number Generator in Fortran.

Eric sweet-talked the computer operators at Ford to let him run a few programs on their mainframes. Ford didn't use Fortran, so he had to start learning Cobol and RPG.

A few months later, the class was invited to attend Computer Science Day at Waterloo University. They found out that Waterloo hosted these events every Saturday for students from around Ontario. The next weekend, the students returned to Waterloo posing as students from the school being hosted that weekend. No one caught on, so they tried their luck every weekend after that.

Eric worked for Gulf Oil after gradutaing Grade 13 and learned how to use IBM Unit Record equipment.

Eric went to McMaster University, and later Sheridan College where his interests were valuies: Artificial Intelligence, Operating Systems, and Monte Carlo Simulations.

Eric graduated with a diploma in Computer Science and went to work for Mohawk Data Sciences helping build the operating system an Intel 8008 machine. From there, he worked as a mainframe software developer at large copmpanies such as Ford, Cullinet Software, Telus Communications, and Hewlett-Packard.

Eric's interests are varied: web development, database systems, language compilers, VoIP, and user interfaces.