Timeline - 1980s

Waterloo Maple, a computer algebra system, is developed by Keith Geddes and Gaston Gonnet.
MicroWAT, developed by CSG, debuts. It influences the design of early microcomputers including NABU PC and Commodore's SuperPET.
Microcomputers are introduced in undergraduate education.

UW produces roughly one third of Canada's Computer Science graduates.
Waterloo Basic Enterprises Ltd. is acquired by Structured Computing Systems Ltd. and is renamed Waterloo Computing Systems Inc. (WATCOM).
Northern Digital Incorporated, a spin-off company of UW, is founded by Jerry Krist to build MicroWAT.

Institute for Computer Research (ICR) is established, with Eric Manning as first Director.
UW and IBM undertake a major partnership involving networking technology, providing $17,500,000 for research and development.
IBM PCs are acquired for educational purposes.
JANET, a local area network to support IBM PCs, is developed by Adrian Weerheim and Jerry Bolce.

Doug Lawson succeeds John Brzozowski as Chair of the Department of Computer Science (1983 - 1984).
Hewlett-Packard announces a computer partnership with UW, providing $250,000 worth of computing equipment.

Bruce Simpson succeeds Doug Lawson as Chair of the Department of Computer Science (1984 - 1987).
Digital Equipment Corporation (WATDEC) enters into a research agreement with UW, providing $25,000,000 worth of hardware.
New Oxford English Dictionary project is started by Gaston Gonnet and Frank Tompa to computerize the OED.
Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba, IBM, and NEC provide laptop computers to project ARIES for development of educational software systems and networks.

Macintosh PCs are donated by Apple for first-year computer laboratories.
First annual conference of the Centre of New OED is held at UW. Nine more conferences in this series are co-sponsored by UW and Oxford University Press in subsequent years.

NSERC gives $1,300,000 over three years to UW to support research in "text dominated databases".
MacJANET, an Apple Macintosh version of the JANET local-area network, is developed at CSG.

John Brzozowski succeeds Bruce Simpson as Chair of the Department of Computer Science (1987 - 1989).
The ITRC is formed as part of the Ontario government's Centres of Excellence funding program. Six academic departments participate: Queen's University Computing Science, University of Toronto Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, UW Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and The University of Western Ontario Computer Science.

The Davis Centre is officially opened by the honourable David Peterson, Premier of Ontario, along with ex-Premier William Davis.
Waterloo Maple Software is incorporated.

Paul Larson succeeds John Brzozowski as Chair of the Department of Computer Science (1989 - 1992).
Open Text Systems is incorporated as a spin-off from the New OED project. The associated research leads to development of one of the world's first full-text search engines.