75 YEARS

Northern Telecom SL-1 PBX

SL-1 was the first practical digital PBX (public branch exchange, or private telephone switchboard) and, in many ways, the first practical digital switch. It was developed in the early 1970s at Bell-Northern Research (BNR) and sold by Northern Electric (later Nortel). The SL-1 design was so successful, it was logical to extend the new powerful digital technology to the telephone central office. Thus, BNR developed the DMS-10 for small central offices in 1977, followed two years later by the DMS-100 digital switch for

Leigh Instruments Crash Position Indicator (CPI)

Originally invented at the National Research Council, the technology was subsequently developed and successfully commercialized by Leigh Instruments in Carleton Place. The CPI is the forerunner of today’s aviation flight recorder or “black box” systems.

BY LUC LALANDE PHOTOS SUPPLIED BY LUC LALANDE

It will surprise many to learn that the technology industry in Ottawa can trace its origins back 75 years to the founding of the city’s first true “startup” tech company — Computing Devices Canada — in 1948.

The emergence of that company occurred almost 10 years before the iconic Fairchild Semiconductor company itself became the incubator of Silicon Valley.

Who could have foretold that a small group of venturesome technology founders would have unleashed a wave of pioneering innovation and entrepreneurship that, 75 years later, established Ottawa as a globally recognized technology hub?

The Three Eras of Ottawa’s Tech Sector History

As with Silicon Valley, the Ottawa region played a significant role in advancing strategic and applied research during World War II, giving allies critical technological advantages in domains such as signals intelligence, counter-measures, microwave radar and much more. Central to the wartime scientific effort was the role of government research centres, notably

Northern Telecom Digital Multiplex System/DMS-100

The DMS-100 Switch Digital Multiplex System (DMS) was a line of telephone exchange switches manufactured by Northern Telecom. Designed during the 1970s and released in 1979, it can control 100,000 telephone lines. The development of Northern Telecom’s digital telephone switching systems was made possible by the success of the E13 chip, an integrated circuit that housed filters, encoders and decoders — the workhorses of a digital telephone switch — on a single chip.

Gandalf Technologies radiobased mobile data terminal

Founded in 1971 in Ottawa by entrepreneurs Desmond Cunningham and Colin Patterson, Gandalf carved a niche as a pioneer in data communications, becoming a major player in products such as modems just as the market came into existence. In the early years, the technology was revolutionary, enabling users to connect with computers over the phone to create networks of systems in different geographic locations.

Mitel SX-200

The SX-200 system was Mitel’s flagship since its introduction in 1978. Mitel’s SX-200, a PBX that could handle 200 inside phone lines, was the smallest, most feature-rich and easiest-to-use PBX product on the market at the time. In 1978, sales of the SX-200 were on a rocket ship trajectory upwards.

the National Research Council of Canada (NRC). Research employment at the NRC ballooned from 200 in 1939 to over 3,000 by the war’s end in 1945.

The First Era (1948–1994) marking the genesis of Ottawa’s technology sector was, without a doubt, precipitated by the growth of government-led R&D fueled by WWII and the subsequent Cold War period. Government agencies such as the Defence Research Telecommunications Establishment

(now known as the Communications Research Centre), the Defence Research Board (1947–1977) and National Research Council of Canada seeded a talent pool of highly qualified scientists, engineers and technicians that most certainly influenced the fateful decision by Northern Electric to establish its new R&D labs in Ottawa in the late 1950s.

By the late 1950s, the presence of a large pool of local talent associated with “public R&D” played a crucial role in