Inventions that came from Waterloo | Hacker News Reader

Inventions that came from Waterloo

uwaterloo.ca

34 pointsamichail22 comments

The fact that U Waterloo didn't take this opportunity to mention PHP or Blackberry is a rather sad indictment of the Canadian tech scene

Neither PHP nor were the result of research done at UWaterloo, which is what I think they were going for here. That and showing off startups founded by multiple Waterloo students to emphasize the networking a person could do there.

Waterloo is great on engineering, but they desperately need to help their students more. Their WUSA President killed herself just last year: https://www.reddit.com/r/uwaterloo/comments/16tjz9r/wusa_nee...

I read a little bit of that but couldn't discern what the actual problems were aside from some frustration with management. Nothing that in itself would drive someone to suicide, as you're implying. Can you clarify?

Universities have a duty of care to their students. For someone playing such a pivotal role to have suffered to that point is inexcusable.

Anecdotally, uwaterloo is the suicide capital of universities. Them math programs be hard.

The reason that I know UWaterloo is mathNEWS (https://mathnews.uwaterloo.ca).

Funny, Watcom C++ was the most impressive. That's been around forever.

My dad (UW CS grad in the 70s) loves talking about WATFIV, or, “Waterloo Fortran IV” which I’ll never tire of being the most ridiculously confusing name for something.

Naming is hard but does it have to be this hard?!

I remember using Maple in college, it was a really cool tool

Loved being able to visualize functions in realtime

Made calculus a lot more tangible

Also the New OED project: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~fwtompa/newoed-project.html

I thought David Smith of Yorkshire, England came up with the hat shape and it was just verified by Dr. Craig Kaplan.

I thought this was going to be about the battle of Waterloo.

Couldn’t escape (the geese) if I wanted to…

and PHP indirectly (where Lerdorf studied)

Not only did I not know these inventions didn't come from U Waterloo, I also did not know most of these inventions existed!

If you're going to tout your inventions, it's probably better to list things people have heard of.

(Of course I knew of Maple, and I think I've heard of Watcom, although I may be getting confused with another company.)

As a Canadian, I can attest chest-thumping is not our forté

As an American, I knew multiple of those were from Waterloo, but not all. The post makes me think Waterloo does not realize they're totally respected.

Another thing we're not good at

I think the list I wanted / expected was, “10 things we’re really proud were invented at Waterloo (that you may or may not realize were invented here)”

Watcom was pretty big in the C/C++ world in the 90's, I think. I was only doing a little bit of C/C++ programming back then but I kept hearing about it.

For a 90s minute, between like 93 and 96. Visual Studio 6.0's VC++ swallowed its market amazingly rapidly.

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