When Nadia Comaneci dismounted from the uneven bars at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, the world knew it had seen something special. And Pierre Ducros knew he had a problem.
Comaneci’s score came up as 1.00, since the scoring system was incapable of showing a perfect 10.00. Ducros and his company DMR Group Inc., the organization responsible for the Olympics scoring system, had been told a three-digit scoring system would suffice. Comaneci proved everyone wrong.
“We were told nobody had ever gotten a 10,” he said. “So the system had to be repaired in the middle of the night…since the whole world was watching.”
The Olympics scoring project, being led by Ducros’s partner and DMR co-founder Alain Roy, was one of the early success stories of this pioneering Canadian IT company.
In fact DMR was responsible for the scoring systems at the next two summer Olympics, where an army of people helped them get event results in 15 minutes so the international press could distribute them around the world.
But Ducros and his company had rather humble beginnings in a small office in Place Bonaventure in Montreal in the early 1970s, all of which can be traced back to time spent at the Royal Military College of Canada and IBM Corp.
Born in 1939, Ducros received his BA from the Universit