Nick Waddell's  Instablog

Remember 1983? If you do it might be for a night in February of that year when the final episode of MASH became the most watched television show ever. Or perhaps it was for November 2nd, when Ronald Reagan signed a bill creating Martin Luther King Day. It may have even been the last day of the year, when Apple's "1984" Super Bowl ad debuted.

Whatever you remember it for, you almost certainly do not remember 1983 for the emergence of a small Canadian tech company called Glentel (NASDAQ:GLNIF, TSX:GLN). That's how long the Telco has been public. It has taken Glentel almost as long as that to bear real fruit for investors. But as we turn towards the second half of 2009, some twenty six years after its IPO, an argument could be made that Glentel has never been in better shape.

Glentel's story has more than its fair share of twists and turns. The Company's roots actually go all the way back to an auto glass shop in New Westminster, BC that was founded by the Skidmor family, in 1946. Fast forward to 1985, and Glentel became the original service dealer for communications giant Rogers; a move that seems less unlikely when one recalls the mania and prestige that surrounded having an actual working phone in your car in those salad days of cellular. By 1989, the little glass shop was called TCG and it had just completed a purchase of acompany called Glenayre Electronics, which it renamed Glentel.