Tim Lethbridge's Bell-Northern Research Years

After finishing my Master's thesis at the University of New Brunswick, I moved to Ottawa in 1987 to work for Bell-Northern research. My interest in that company was stimulated by experiences I had in 1981 when I won a trip to Ottawa paid for by BNR

BNR was my second experience working as a software engineer, the first having been my work at the Government of New Brunswick. At BNR I worked in the CAD group under a series of managers. I primarily developed database applications to support the design of hardware devices. During this time my software engineering skills solidified and I was exposed to BNR's well-developed processes for configuration management, testing and quality control. Also during this period, I had my first exposure to object oriented techniques.

During this period, I became seriously involved in recreational activities in the Ottawa area. I also took a graduate course on expert systems with Doug Skuce. I had been planning to work on my PhD all along, but Doug convinced me to study at the University of Ottawa.

I had one more exposure to BNR: While working on my PhD research, I had a year-long contract for to do knowledge engineering work on a highly innovative real-time software design tool, then called 'Telos'. This tool later became known as ObjecTime.

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