It turned out otherwise. Through Wright’s efforts, the university won the contract (beating out IBM and Lockheed, among others), though it took months of convincing on both sides. But the search technologies UW developed led to the founding of OpenText, which went on to become Canada’s largest software company, with 4,400 employees. Those search technologies were later adapted by Yahoo!, giving it the ability to search every word on every Web page.

That same year, Mike Lazaridis, a UW engineering student who had grown up in Waterloo, asked Wright if he could leave the program to pursue his business interests; he felt he could always return and finish his degree. As president, Wright officially counselled him to finish but privately offered encouragement for his business plan. In March 1984, Lazaridis, along with a childhood friend, Douglas Fregin, incorporated Research in Motion.

RIM grew into a multibillion-dollar tech powerhouse, bringing highly paid employees (estimated at between 7,000 and 8,000) to the area, and fostering a strong relationship with UW, where it has found many recruits. Equally important was how the executives chose to spend their new wealth. Lazaridis has given $170 million of his own money to establish the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. The idea behind Perimeter was to create an environment for the world’s leading physicists to pursue super string theory or inflation theory, or to figure out what exactly banged during the big bang, with no commercial pressures — though, as Lazaridis pointed out to the institute’s first director, Howard Burton, the BlackBerry was essentially based on nineteenth-century physics. “Imagine,” Lazaridis said, “what we could do with twentieth-century physics or twenty-first-century physics.”

While Lazaridis was trying to reconcile the fundamental laws of nature, his co-CEO, Jim Balsillie, decided to address world politics and government. In 2001, he donated $20 million to establish the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo. In 2009, he gave $50 million to UW, nearby Wilfrid Laurier University, and CIGI, as part of an initiative to found the Balsillie School of International Affairs.

CIGI is housed in what was once Seagram’s barrel warehouse for aging whisky. The building was erected in 1857, and in 1928 Joseph Seagram sold it to Sam Bronfman. When Prohibition was repealed in the US in 1933, profits soared and Seagram’s became the world’s largest distiller, with Waterloo a prominent centre of its operations. In its heyday, Seagram’s employed 250 people. But Sam’s sons watched the distillery business fade in the ’70s, as people turned away from whisky and vodka in favour of wine. By the ’80s, the industry was in decline. Edgar Bronfman Jr. decided to get out of the business, and Seagram’s closed its doors in 1992. Edgar went on to embrace the creative class, buying into media and entertainment, and lost much of the family fortune in his bet on Vivendi Universal. Not all creative classes are created equal.

Now the site has been effectively repurposed, the new economy replacing the old. Two of the beautiful old stone Seagram’s buildings were converted into condos, CIGI occupies the barrel house, and the ambitious Balsillie campus is slated to be built adjacent to it. When finished, the complex will cover the entire block.

In 2002, Lazaridis followed the Perimeter Institute with the Institute for Quantum Computing, to which he contributed $100 million. It will be housed in the newly built Mike and Ophelia Lazaridis Quantum-Nano Centre on the UW campus, to facilitate interaction with the mathematics and engineering faculties. The centre is an extension of Lazaridis’ interest in physics and is devoted to pure science, but it, too, holds out the possibility of commercial revolution. Classical computers, as they are called by quantum physicists, use silicon chips to facilitate calculations. These chips have grown smaller and faster, but even the fastest classical computer only performs one calculation at a time. Rather than silicon chips, quantum computers use quantum particles, such as atoms, and the advantage is that they can make many calculations simultaneously. For simple problems, the difference is minor, but for certain complex ones the gains will be extraordinary. It will cause a revolution in security, for one thing. “Quantum computing,” the institute’s website reads, “has the potential to revitalize a host of existing technologies and generate new ones, to open new windows on the nature and origin of the universe, and to change the way we think about information and reality itself.” This, the site states, is the beginning of an Alice in Wonderland parallel universe era, where cats can be both dead and alive at the same time. And where Scotty could, perhaps, beam you up.

Ray Laflamme, executive director of the Institute for Quantum Computing, is a lithe, athletic man originally from Quebec, and a former protege of Stephen Hawking. He convinced Hawking that in a contracting universe, time wouldn’t run in reverse, and he has been a world pioneer in quantum information. Waterloo has a twelve-qubit (an amalgam of “quantum” and “bit”) quantum computer, the world’s largest, and Laflamme showed it to me.

The future is housed in what looks like a RadioShack storeroom, with steel shelves holding generic-looking electronics. The computer — a large canister with wires coming out of the top, surrounded by a knotty pine fence — resembles a moonshine still. Extremely sensitive to noise, light, and vibration, quantum computers are cumbersome and touchy. Using atoms to perform calculations is like asking a large class of extremely gifted kids who all suffer from separate conditions (peanut allergies, paranoia, passive-aggressive tendencies) to tackle a problem collectively. A fifty-qubit computer would be as powerful as the largest existing supercomputer. A 1,000-qubit quantum computer could solve in a few days complex problems that all the world’s supercomputers combined could not. “With quantum mechanics,” Laflamme says, “we are learning how to speak the language of atoms and molecules. Before, we could look at the effects, but we could hardly control them. Now we have the right language, the right tools, the right methods of controlling them.”

A commercial quantum computer isn’t imminent, but when it does arrive, in ten or twenty (or fifty) years, Silicon Valley will be eclipsed by Quantum Valley, and Waterloo will be poised to capitalize on the moment. In part through Lazaridis and Balsillie, Waterloo has a focus that is both global and universal, and that looks to the future. But the local and the present are still where everyone lives, where Balsillie and Lazaridis live. What kind of city does the creative class create?