The rise and fall of Canada's tech sweetheart

The stumble and collapse of Canadas once powerful telecommunication giant is a saga that many will have a hard time forgetting.

The company that started out in 1882 manufacturing telephone handsets morphed into Northern Electric Co. Ltd. and later became the famous or, depending on whom you talk to, infamous internet-boom darling, Nortel Networks. Like many corporations during the dot-com boom, it saw immense growth, but it all ended in the 2000s when financial mismanagement, a changing market and a failed restructuring plan brought the company crashing down.

Listed below are the high and low points of Nortel's recent history, dating back to its independence in 2000.