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David Keith had an irrepressible zest for life.Jane Minett/Supplied
In the 1970s, decades before the term Big Data entered the lexicon, computer scientist David Keith revelled in building massive databases and writing comprehensible programming language so users could get the most out of those treasure troves of information.
“He had the idea that data was of value and that he needed to democratize it to make it accessible to people who were not computing professionals. This was unusual at the time,” says software executive Leslie Goldsmith, a protégé and former colleague
Mr. Keith was 82 when he died on Oct. 10 from complications of Alzheimer’s. A member of the first class to graduate with a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Waterloo, Mr. Keith was always a trailblazer, say those who knew him best.
Through the course of his career, Mr. Keith generated multiple millions of dollars worth of business for software consultancy I.P. Sharp Associates, Reuters and The Globe and Mail, says retired software executive Jane Minett, his wife of 45 years.
For I.P. Sharp and Reuters, he created financial, aviation and energy data products for global markets.
At The Globe, in the late 1990s, Mr. Keith designed the hugely popular interactive GlobeInvestor and GlobeFund sites that empowered online customers to track the performance of their own portfolios over time and browse for better opportunities. For instance, they could look up 52-week highs and lows and search for stocks that had recently posted the biggest losses or gains in their sectors.
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Mr. Keith loved spending time at the family cottage in Georgian Bay.Frank Gross/Courtesy of family
Previously, readers had to rely on the print edition of the morning newspaper to find closing prices from the day before. These new online tools “put the power of financial professionals into the hands of consumers,” says Lib Gibson, who was chief executive officer of what was then known a Bell Globemedia Interactive. There would be more advances to come.
Mr. Keith “proved to be a very far-sighted and influential pioneer of the digital business,” says Phillip Crawley, former chief executive officer and publisher of The Globe and Mail.
Recruited in 1998 to fight a newspaper war when The National Post entered the market, Mr. Crawley was intrigued by Mr. Keith’s vision of taking live, real-time data from stock markets around the world and making the information available online to subscribers. That vision was realized in 2001 with the launch of GlobeInvestorGOLD. The site, developed by Mr. Keith in collaboration with Mr. Goldsmith and others, outstripped the capabilities of most of Canada’s major financial institutions at the time, with many of those financial institutions paying a monthly fee to use GlobeInvestorGOLD on their own websites.
“It really was revolutionary” and greatly expanded The Globe’s digital subscriber base, Mr. Crawley says. All the various interactive financial products are now rolled up under the Globe Investor banner, which is a subsection of Report on Business and available to Globe subscribers. Today’s Globe Investor still offers market data and the popular Watchlist tool, along with daily market news and analysis.
Born on May 5, 1943 in St. John’s, David Keith spent most of his childhood in Ottawa, where his father, Bob Keith, was a senior official in the federal government. In the course of his public service career, the elder Mr. Keith served as a diplomat in the Canadian embassy in Washington, and rose to the rank of assistant deputy minister in the Department of Defence Production, Ms. Minett says. His mother, Joan (née Watson), returned to her career as a nurse when David and his younger siblings, Bruce and Mimsie, were older.
As a child, David was a builder. “He would build model planes, he would build electronic stuff, he would wire the house for sound,” Ms. Minett says. He and Bruce also got up to a fair bit of mischief and David would later regale his own four children with what he called the bad-boy stories: stealing the horse-drawn milk wagon, tying their sister to a tree with curlers in her hair.
He got his undergraduate degree in mathematics at Carleton University, where Ms. Gibson was a classmate. “He really, really found his groove when he discovered computers doing his master’s degree at the University of Waterloo,” Ms. Minett says.
After graduating, Mr. Keith joined the Toronto-based software consultancy I.P. Sharp Associates, which assigned him to open a Montreal branch. The company specialized in the creation of software to handle very large databases and software for process-control systems in industrial reactors, air-traffic control and military applications. Mr. Keith was in his element, winning new customers by listening closely to what their needs were.
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As a computer scientist, Mr. Keith revelled in helping users get the most out of treasure troves of information.Courtesy of family
“David’s main goal was to make sure people understood what he could do for them,” says Ms. Gibson, who also landed at I.P. Sharp, as did Ms. Minett. It’s where she and Mr. Keith met.
Mr. Keith was unflappable, no matter how complex the problem or how tight the deadline, Ms. Gibson recalls.
“The story of how I.P. Sharp got into aviation data is vintage David,” Ms. Gibson says. The U.S. Civil Aviation Board was inviting proposals for a new database and Mr. Keith sat quietly among the big American firms as the CAB described what it wanted.
“With the powerful Sharp APL computer language, masters like David could build applications at lightning speed. So David stayed up all night and demoed the solution in the morning. He won the business on the spot.”
He also had considerable charm, Ms. Gibson adds. She relates the time he somehow convinced airline staff to return a plane to the gate when he’d arrived too late to join Ms. Gibson on a business trip to Syracuse, N.Y. Ms. Gibson was beside herself when the plane pulled out without Mr. Keith. “Then the plane stopped, rolled back to the gate and the door opened.” In came Mr. Keith, walking nonchalantly down the aisle with a big smile.
Mr. Goldsmith was 13 when Mr. Keith took him under his wing. I.P. Sharp had just displaced IBM as the provider of a time-sharing service that allowed his school’s programming class to dial into a mainframe computer off-site. It was 1970, and Lower Canada College in Montreal was one of a small number of Canadian high schools providing computer programming classes at the time. Impressed by the lad’s aptitude, Mr. Keith declined the school’s request to automate its report cards, saying that young Leslie could do the job for free. The teenager rose to the challenge and Mr. Keith stayed in touch.
Luckily, he had a sense of humour. I.P. Sharp had developed its own internal electronic messaging network – well before average Canadians had e-mail – and Mr. Goldsmith managed to break into the supposedly confidential system multiple times. Mr. Keith hired the young hacker to come in and build a new, secure system. He would later end up working at I.P. Sharp full-time.
Mr. Keith had an irrepressible zest for life. The couple’s four children, Chris, Karina, Alice and Andy, were his pride and joy, Ms. Minett says. He loved spending time at the family cottage in Georgian Bay, where six grandchildren were eventually added to the mix. He also leaves his brother and sister.
Sadly, “[A] 15-year journey with Alzheimer’s robbed us of the person he once was,” Ms. Minett wrote in the death notice. The disease took his speech, recognition and movement, she says, but his sweet personality never changed.
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