Plastic2Oil Inc (PTOI)

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Mr. Bordynuik, now 40, describes himself as a former whiz kid, who as a boy found himself fascinated with computers. As the story goes, instead of toys the young lad played with equipment "donated" to him by technology companies such as Honeywell, IBM, and Digital Equipment Corporation. The unstated comparison with Bill Gates of Microsoft is as inescapable as it is unlikely.

Community newspapers, with their wide-eyed fondness for local-boy-does-well stories, are a favourite destination for stock promoters such as Mr. Bordynuik. In 2007, he and Niagara This Week had a little sitdown. He recalled for the reporter that as a mere boy of seven he decided to try and build a robot. Parts and equipment were expensive, he told the paper, so his father somehow obtained old computers from local companies. Little John -- it would have been about pre-PC 1977 -- never built his robot, but he learned all about electronics, he says, by taking old computers apart, repairing them, and putting them back together.

It was an unlikely interest for a child, and makes a curious if dubious tale. Some of the first machines he claims to have worked on were DEC PDP-8s. Though not designed for home use, the PDP-8 was much smaller than a mainframe. For several years during the 1970s, it was the best-selling computer in the world. By the 1980s, with the advent of the first PCs and Macs, the PDP-8 had fallen out of favour, and old models were apparently Mr. Bordynuik's for the asking.

In 1989, the prodigy entered Brock University; only a year later he dropped out, he says, to work in research and development for the IT department of the Ontario Provincial Legislature. He stayed at Queen's Park for 10 years. While there, he became an expert in data recovery, repairing or redesigning obsolete equipment and recovering old information thought to be lost forever.