Our Story.
John Bordynuik Inc. (JBI) was incorporated on February 10, 2006.
But for John Bordynuik, President and CEO of JBI, his dream
business began long before that.
Bordynuik has spent his entire life learning everything there is
to know about computer hardware and software. As a child, his
preferred toys consisted of computer hardware donated to him from
technology leaders like Honeywell, IBM and Digital Equipment
Corporation. Along with these systems, he was given manuals,
schematics and operations guides. He absorbed it all, relentless to
learn, hungry for more.
As he grew up, Bordynuik continued to absorb and adapt the
information he acquired. Drawn to Toronto, he delved into Research
and Development for the Ontario Government and became the youngest
person to ever work at Queen's Park.
Bordynuik spent the next 10 years learning about politics and
business in the public sector. During this time, he traveled the
continent, adding to the "big iron" collection he had begun in his
youth. This extensive archive of original mainframes, super
computers and tapes from the 1950s to the 1970s included a 1972
PDP11/35. While using this computer as a demonstrative tool on
eBay, Bordynuik captured the attention of some of the computer
industry's major players.
Bordynuik found his niche, using Harvard tapes to design
hardware and software to recover the "Holy Grail" of software,
which had been lost by the founders of the largest software company
in the world. He worked hard, applying his knowledge of analog and
digital electronics and tape tribology, and was sought out by the
founders of a number of other large corporations for restoration
and recovery of their lost and damaged media.
In 2004, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
discovered Bordynuik and asked him to try where so many others had
failed before, by attempting to read more than two-dozen tons of
tapes that had been recorded by the venerable institution between
the 1960s and 1995.
When Bordynuik was asked to present his theories and processes
to the key faculty at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), they were so impressed by his
innovation and knowledge that they invited him to join their Math
and Computation Group as a Collaborative Researcher.
Inspired by his success, Bordynuik incorporated John
Bordynuik Inc.
NASA, who remains one of JBI's most loyal clients, soon
contracted JBI to recover valuable earth science sensor data that
had been recorded from the 1960s to 2000. By recovering this
previously unreadable data from the 7- and 9-track tapes on which
it was stored, JBI also helped to solve a major scientific data
storage problem for NASA. Bordynuik was able to successfully
migrate the data from their reel-to-reel tapes to modern media,
amalgamating 200,000 tapes onto one hard disk array. In 2008, NASA
awarded JBI with sole-sourced status, meaning that NASA
will only award its data recovery business to JBI in the
future.
JBI maintains an ongoing relationship with both NASA and MIT,
helping the institutions with all of their data recovery and
management needs that arise. In the three years since its
inception, JBI has built a strong reputation in legacy data
recovery while also completing recovery projects for the United
Nations (UN), the Ontario Provincial Government, and many other
institutions and Fortune 100 companies and their founders.