I found this job at the computer centre of the Université de Sherbrooke, having responded to an ad in the newspaper La Presse. It wasn’t quite “in my field” if there was such a thing after the experience of developing COMPO and the map-making software, and I found that the best part of it was the few hours a week I had to be at the “consulting desk” solving people’s problems. This was an IBM 360 installation, and even that was relatively new to me, but in a sense it was all about trying to figure out what they were trying to do, and find in the manuals the description of their instructions. I even learned basic computer operations, mounting magnetic tapes and disk packs, so it was fun to be around.

In the late spring, the director of the Math department came to ask if I could teach a summer class to substitute a professor suddenly unable to do it. I had given them a seminar on the Pascal language, and the class was about programming languages. In my usual way I accepted without asking too many questions, but the answer to are there any notes or a syllabus I could use was “no.” I spent nights and week-ends (my boss, who was present at the meeting, had not reduced my workload at the centre, and later reproached it to me!) researching the ACM’s curriculum, which called for teaching a variety of languages to give students a spectrum. In a sense that was my favorite subject, and I even showed them SNOBOL and LISP… But gave them a programming assignment in PL/I (which I knew was available on the IBM mainframe). It was quite a busy summer, and I wished I had been better prepared, but I preferred it to systems administration.

In January 1979, I drove to Montreal for my birthday week-end, and decided to stop by the university (Montreal) on Monday to visit my advisor (Paul Bratley), unannounced of course (a real introvert: I still rarely use the phone). I asked him about PhD programs, and he offered a few possibilities mostly in the vicinity across the US border, but then pulled a letter he had received from Switzerland that asked if we could send them the COMPO software. He said I should write back to offer to go myself and bring them the magnetic tape. I really wasn’t sure what to do, but then I had dinner with friends who encouraged me to give it a try. I wrote a letter to the people at Bobst Graphic, and it didn’t take long to get a positive response. I vaguely remember resigning before I was sure of anything, closing the apartment in Sherbrooke, and moving back to my parents’ house in Laval. There, one morning, I got a phone call from Daniel Borel himself, asking me when I planned to be there. I got a passport and plane ticket, and on March 16, 1979, I boarded the Air France flight to Paris at the Mirabel airport (anyone remembers the Mirabel airport?). I was carrying that magnetic tape… At the Geneva airport, Jean-Luc Mazzone drove me to his parents’ house where I would be their guest, this very shy and introverted person in this tight family setting.

I started commuting with Daniel Borel that Monday morning to Bobst Graphic, very early every morning, getting a summary of his ideas of the last 12 hours. His team was building a word processor that they called BeeZy (for Borel-Zappacosta), and the company made phototypesetters which they wanted to sell with it. There was a competing group which wanted to interface through a mini-computer (a Data General Nova), and it didn’t take too many trips in his small Fiat for him to convince me to get COMPO to run directly on the BeeZy (a Z80-based microcomputer). I never looked at the magnetic tape… I think I never wrote in Pascal again!

That really was a fun project… I had to learn how to program the Z80 and their solutions to making a little more memory available than the basic 32K (some software acrobatics doing bank switching), learn another programming language and environment (PL/M on Intel’s ISIS), making program files on diskettes that needed an amusing transfer procedure to the CP/M operating system that ran the BeeZy (it was officially called the BG-1000, once they made the furniture for it). I had the privilege to meet Trevor Higonnet, son of the inventor of the phototypesetter (the co-inventor Mr. Moyroud would show up once in a while), and he took care of the justification algorithms as I knew nothing of it. I completely redesigned COMPO, made it to generate computer code (no longer an interpreter) so that the whole thing could fit in memory (i.e. the first phase of the software, parsing the text description, had to disappear from memory) and run efficiently (e.g. minimizing access to the floppy disk).

It worked really well, actually. So much so that Daniel Borel at the end of my 4 months there asked if I would meet and join Pierluigi Zappacosta who was working out of Palo Alto. I wasn’t sure about that (remember how not sure I was about going to Switzerland?), and the next two years were back and forth between the two. The office in Palo Alto (165 University Ave) later became the first office of Logitech, and I even used the BeeZy to typeset our early ad copies (I’ll show you when I write about 1981-1982!).

I ended up subletting an apartment in the town of Morges, not far from Lausanne. Soon it was clear I couldn’t always ride my bike to the office (it rained a lot), and I bought an old car (a wreck by Swiss standards), a Citroen Ami 8. The bike vanished from the bike parking space outside, but as a foreigner I was scared of the Swiss police. It was also fortuitous that the landlord wanted to kick me out when the actual renter told me to take over the lease, as a month later it was time to go. Still it was very enjoyable to be able to take trains to Paris or Venice on week-ends. Other than that I ate too much Gruyeres cheese and milk chocolate.

In 1981, Bobst Graphic was sold to Autologic, and the management didn’t want to talk to a delegation from Japan’s Ricoh company (who made our daisy-wheel printers) as they were curious to find out about the development of newer word processors. That became the opportunity to spin out Logitech from BobstGraphic. Meanwhile I got a ticket back to Montreal, and started looking at my options there.

I really didn’t have a plan, and it became a summer of trying this or that from the study in the basement of my parents’ house. I tried working at a friend’s project at the university, applied at Micom, a company making a word processor that had just been acquired by Phillips (sounds familiar?), applied for a PhD at Waterloo University… And then Pierluigi Zappacosta showed up in Montreal en route for Europe, talked about having obtained a small contract for a feasibility study for Ricoh. I drove him to Mirabel airport, and admittedly I was dreaming of going back (I’m still an air travel geek, 40 years later)… Soon after I followed (already an air travel geek) and we worked in Daniel Borel’s back room study, writing that feasibility study. We went to visit Niklaus Wirth in Zurich, Giacomo Marini in Ivrea… During a phone call with my parents, they told me I had jumped ship from a genuine offer at Micom, and I had a positive response from Waterloo waiting for me.

As we finished the feasibility study, Pierluigi said we had to do the project in Palo Alto, because that was closer to Japan. I had to wait a bit more before we could proceed, but really no other job or university program could beat the prospect of doing this development. They were going to Japan with the document I finished typing on the BG-1000, and they would give me news by the end of the year… It just felt like the best thing at the moment, and that turned out to be great.

I took pictures of the BG-1000 brochures I saved (already labeled Autologic):