Anniversaries 1866-1969

Easter fell on the first Sunday in April 1969 and the disaster struck just before the holiday weekend. It occurred in the Aer Lingus computer department and was caused by a mistake in the allocation of data storage space on a bank of disk drives. The error was discovered late at night after all of the airline’s passenger name records – about 100,000 in total – had been overwritten with system messages. This process could not be reversed.

The Aer Lingus reservations system, which was known inside the company as Astral, required not just one, but two IBM mainframes. It had recently gone live following the largest computer investment that the country had seen to date.

Sales agents Dympna O’Flynn and Mary Lennon using Astral terminals.

As a rule Irish businesses in the 1960s were late adopters of computer technologies. Even the largest organisations made do with machines from the low end of the manufacturers’ product ranges and seldom looked beyond accounting applications. Computing was still something that engineers and programmers practised out of sight of ordinary folks, entering arcane messages into typewriter-like devices in order to converse with their systems.

Aer Lingus, in contrast, had introduced leading-edge data communications and become one the first organisations anywhere to implement IBM’s IPARS software – a sales and passenger records application. Its frontline employees could access the system from more than 200 user terminals whose screens displayed up to 1960 characters. This style of computing was exceptional because it transformed the everyday work of staff who dealt with customers.

The airline liked to show off its data processing muscle. Visitors to the Aer Lingus head office at Dublin Airport could view its IBM System/360 computers and their rows of disk drives through a glass wall in the reception area of the building.

IPARS was an enhanced version of a reservations system from the US – the ‘I’ in its name signifying ‘international’. In 1967 Aer Lingus was one of five European airlines – along with Alitalia, BOAC, KLM and Swissair – that committed themselves to implement the system. IBM relocated about 200 software developers to an IPARS project office in London and began to ship its new generation of mainframe computers to the airlines. A pair of System/360 model 50s arrived at the Aer Lingus headquarters before the end of 1967.

Aer Lingus showed off its computer room through a glass wall.

Dick Cahill was the manager responsible for this project at IBM Ireland, where Joe Cunningham oversaw a local technical team that included Kevin O’Brien, Declan O’Riordan, Robert Poynton, Paul Kilcullen, John Holland and Stephen Ellis. After IPARS went live at Dublin Airport IBM delegated some of its hardware engineers and systems software specialists to keep operations running there.

David Kennedy was the systems manager in Aer Lingus. He had persuaded the company to implement the IPARS software and he also came up with the Astral name – an acronym from ‘Advanced System of Telecommunications and Reservations for Aer Lingus’.

Denis Behan became the airline’s main liaison with IBM. Paddy Byrne was in charge of the Aer Lingus data processing department and Liam Cassidy was its operations manager. Brian Ennis and Emmet Wilson held senior software development roles. In total the airline employed about 30 programmers and system analysts, who were based on the fourth floor of head office.

John Cronin seated in front of the operator’s console on one of the IBM mainframes.

Aer Lingus looked to the United States for computer room expertise, recruiting Americans Ron Chaffee and Ron Schlitt along with Irish expatriates Pat Cormican and John Cronin. It soon employed sixteen computer operators who worked in teams of four, supported by more than 40 punch card equipment operators and the communications engineers who managed the online connections. It also provided Astral training to the reservations controllers who were in charge of the flight schedules and to the sales agents who would capture passenger details for the system, keying in codes from a prompt sheet.

The new booking procedure was still not fully computerised. In the early years of Astral there was no way of printing tickets at the reservations desk. When the staff had recorded a sale through the computer terminal, they would write out the customer’s ticket by hand.

In autumn 1968 BOAC became the first of the IPARS users to start making reservations through the system. Aer Lingus claimed to have the second implementation, but it never held a formal launch event or switch-on celebration. No one knows who the first Astral-enabled customer was.

Some project veterans suggest that the reservations system was not fully operational until April 1969. Others point out that a first batch of sales agents at the airline completed training for Astral in the previous November. Some Aer Lingus employees, moreover, were still using an older reservations system – a ‘teleregister’ that indicated seat availability but could not capture passenger names – in the second half of 1969.

It would appear, therefore, that Astral was phased into service as one group after another completed user training and as one location after another was connected to the mainframes.

Aer Lingus marketed the expertise in its computer department to other airlines. This 1975 brochure features (l-r): Conor Campion, Maurice Wallace, Bill Thompson, Patricia Brennan, Pat Cormican, Gerry McGrath and Brian Kirby.

Each of these links was a landmark for the project. The Astral network connected the Aer Lingus headquarters with sales offices and airports in eighteen cities in Europe and North America. It employed special modems that made allowance for industry-specific protocols and national differences in telecommunications standards. Each premises required a hardwired computer to drive the local screens and every configuration was different. When IBM inadvertently installed the Glasgow machine in Birmingham, the company had to take it out and transfer it to the correct office.

The just-before-Easter emergency threatened to bring this entire infrastructure to a halt.

Aer Lingus and IBM both claim credit for resolving the problem. The computer firm called in operating system experts from around the world to examine what had gone wrong. The airline was able to retrieve the lost data from the very basic details held in a separate passenger name index. Eight members of its computing department managed to reconstruct the 100,000 passenger name records in a marathon session that lasted for around 24 hours.

The norms for hardware reliability and service uptime were rather different 50 years ago from today. All systems crashed more frequently in those years. Aer Lingus software veterans recall fixing programs on the fly, taking risks that would be unthinkable in the 21st century. Astral, indeed, collapsed on a second occasion about five years after the April 1969 incident.

As an early adopter of online reservations Aer Lingus not only gained prestige within the travel industry but also opened up new business opportunities. By the mid-1970s the company was developing add-on software applications and assisting other airlines across the globe to automate their booking systems. Its Cara subsidiary had also become one of the largest computer service providers in Ireland. Aer Lingus described itself in a 1975 marketing brochure as ‘probably the most highly computerised medium-sized airline in the world’.

The functionality of the Astral system is curiously familiar to modern eyes when it is compared with the intermittently live, teletypewriter-controlled, one-job-at-a-time applications that other organisations ran in 1969. Likewise, the rapid response to the Aer Lingus data loss was truly dramatic to those who were involved, but now sounds like a normal operating procedure.

What happened at Dublin Airport half a century ago was a foretaste of the future – an early instance of an always-on, network-dependent information environment. That is why the introduction of Astral was a major achievement – especially for an installation whose twin computers had a combined memory of just 512K.

Ireland’s first software company had deep roots in the IBM tradition. System Dynamics was led by Paddy Doyle, a former systems manager at IBM Ireland, and its engineers and programmers had strong technical reputations for work that they had done at the corporation.

From its inception the Dublin firm developed bespoke applications for IBM mainframe computers and it was not long before it attempted to design and sell a proprietary software package. The primary aim of System Dynamics, however, was to siphon away part of IBM Ireland’s revenue stream.

The formal registration date for the new company was 29 April 1968. But the personal connections behind System Dynamics were forged five years before the Companies Registration Office logged its existence.

The cover of an early company brochure, featuring artwork by Anne Kennedy.

In 1963 Raymond Girault, the general manager of IBM Ireland, assigned Paddy Doyle to lead the development of a reservations system for Aer Lingus. This was a major undertaking for IBM Ireland, so he assembled a group with international experience. Technical manager Fred Kennedy and Joe Cunningham, who determined the airline’s functional requirements, had both worked in IBM installations in New York. Fred Kennedy selected Brendan Byrne (another IBM New York veteran), Tom McGovern (who had previously worked as an electrical engineer for Radio Eireann) and Kris Padmanabhan as his program design and analysis team.

Aer Lingus rejected the planned reservations system in 1964 after IBM announced its new System/360 generation of computer technology. The airline was no longer willing to accept software developed for an older platform.

IBM’s project group split up. Paddy Doyle turned to consulting and started lecturing at UCD. Fred Kennedy moved to IBM in France, where he led a project that developed the first fully electronic voice and data switch. Tom McGovern stayed with IBM Ireland. He also studied part-time at UCD, which had introduced the first MBA degree course in Europe.

The members of the software team had got to know each other, and their capabilities, when they worked on the Aer Lingus job. So they stayed in contact.

Software was not yet regarded as a commodity in the mid-1960s and applications did not yet have price tags. The big computer vendors were one-stop-shops that installed and maintained computers and storage equipment and printers, selected and trained technical staff for each installation and even delivered whatever stationery their users required. They developed customer-specific software or taught the customers how to write applications for internal use.

IBM routinely treated software and support as free giveaways for the purchasers of its very expensive machinery. It was common, therefore, for programmers to exchange code with their counterparts in other organisations. They knew the cost of a reel of blank tape, but an application stored on that tape had no apparent value.

As the years passed, however, computing professionals began to question these conventions. Rival hardware makers in the US lobbied against IBM’s effective monopoly on ancillary services for its systems. Independent software vendors and technical service providers began to surface in different parts of the world. Some even attempted to sell replacement software for programs that IBM supplied free of charge.

In 1967 Paddy Doyle, Tom McGovern, Brendan Byrne and Joe Cunningham decided to create a company that would offer an alternative to IBM in Ireland. Soon afterwards Tom McGovern travelled to Paris and discussed this plan with Fred Kennedy and Raymond Girault, who had moved to IBM’s European headquarters there. Kris Padmanabhan was also made aware of what was happening.

62 Northumberland Road: The company’s first address in 1968.

System Dynamics began operations in April 1968 with a board of non-executive directors and initial funding from a group headed by Professor Michael MacCormac, who had set up the MBA course at UCD.

Within three months the start-up had contracts in the bag from three customers – Irish Life, Irish Ropes and the Irish Management Institute. In August the company opened its first office at 62 Northumberland Road, where Paddy Doyle, Tom McGovern and Brendan Byrne were joined by Nick Spalding (another systems programmer from IBM) and secretary Maria O’Regan. Joe Cunningham, meanwhile, had decided to remain with IBM.

In the words of an early customer presentation, ‘The System Dynamics company was founded to create a stimulating environment in which to exercise the highest professional competence in providing much needed services to the information processing community.’ In practice it eked out an unsteady existence by hawking a variety of consulting and systems implementation services for existing and prospective computer users.

By now ‘unbundling’ the costs of systems, software and services was the talk of the computing trade. In December 1968 IBM announced its intention to introduce separate prices for the first time for the different components of its computer business. In the following month the US Justice Department filed an antitrust suit against the corporation. In June 1969 IBM announced new prices for its software products and for its systems engineering, equipment maintenance, customer education and custom programming services.

This changing industry environment improved the commercial prospects for System Dynamics. The company was now entering its second year, but the going was tough. It had met its annual sales target of £20,000, but Brendan Byrne had left the organisation and Paddy Doyle was preparing to depart as well. He had already stepped down as chief executive. Fred Kennedy and Kris Padmanabhan were drafted in over the following months.

System Dynamics overhauled its board in 1970. All of the original directors stood down. Tom McGovern, Fred Kennedy and Raymond Girault, who had retained an apartment and a Rolls-Royce in Dublin, replaced them.

Tom McGovern and Fred Kennedy became joint managing directors with equal shareholdings of almost 50% each. The company relocated to a new base at 72 Merrion Square. It now employed ten staff and its annual revenues had risen to around £35,000.

Tom McGovern was responsible for technical sales and Fred Kennedy took charge of project management. After Ireland joined the EEC he also set up a small System Dynamics office in Brussels to explore the emerging opportunities in European institutions.

This arrangement lasted until 1979, when Fred Kennedy left to launch Malahide-based Computer Applied Techniques. Tom McGovern remained managing director of System Dynamics, as well as the company’s majority shareholder, until his death in 1994. He always gave priority to consulting projects. The company also became known as a provider of technical staff to the larger user installations.

Hence System Dynamics is not remembered as a software product developer. During its early years, however, the company attempted to deliver the first Irish-made commercial software package. Its name was POEMS and it was intended to support factory management. This project was mentioned in company documents from about 1970, but it did not result in a product launch. It is possible, however, that a later version of the software supported a modelling exercise at the SPS International machine tool factory in Shannon.

System Dynamics envisaged POEMS as ‘a program for use in the Manufacturing Industry which is used to analyse production line organization and identify improvements which may be made under the application of Group Technology concepts’.

Judging from that description, the product was probably not easy to sell !

One of the least well known craft traditions at the St James’s Gate Brewery flourished for a brief spell from from the mid 1960s until the early 1970s. It involved cutting and splicing strips of paper tape with rows of holes punched through them. Guinness had to master this technique in order to operate its first computer: an ICT 1902 that arrived at the brewery 50 years ago.

The primary method of information input for the 1902 was an electro-mechanical device that read paper tape at 300 characters a second. Most installations in that era programmed their computers or entered data for processing by feeding stacks of punched cards into the systems. Guinness selected a model that was driven instead by paper ribbons. Modifying the company’s software, therefore, meant editing the paper tape. When staff needed to correct or amend their code, they had to alter or replace those perishable strips.

Half a century afterwards, programming a computer in this way sounds as impractical as mining coal with household cutlery. Guinness, nonetheless, assembled a team that became very proficient at the new paperwork.

The company had spent several years evaluating electronic computers before deciding that the technology was sufficiently reliable and affordable for its purposes. It finally placed an order with International Computers and Tabulators (ICT) in June 1965. The manufacturer promoted the 1902 as one of its small machines. But the system at the brewery was the most powerful model that ICT had sold in Ireland.

Much of the planning and preparation at Guinness had been done by a group of statisticians who reported to the head brewer. They had access to an Elliott Automation computer at An Foras Talúntais / The Agricultural Institute, where they had started to explore scientific applications back in 1962. These experiences enabled them to assess potential tasks for a computer inside the brewery.

It was, however, the Guinness accountants’ department that oversaw the introduction of the ICT 1902. The first computing manager at the brewery was Pat Stephenson, whose job title was ‘accountant-in-charge of computers’. He spent five years in this role, then went back to full-time accountancy, remaining at Guinness until he retired in 1987.

The accountants’ department provided accommodation for the new technology. It converted a group of small offices into a computer room, tearing down the partitions that had previously divided up this workspace. It installed air conditioning to regulate the environment, because changes in temperature and humidity could upset the performance of the equipment. It also imposed strict controls on access to the computer room. Mere programmers were seldom allowed to step through the door.

Fifteen months after Guinness ordered the ICT 1902, it installed the computer in September 1966, along with the paper tape reader and punching machines, a set of four magnetic tape decks for file storage and a floor-standing printer.

ICT’s Dublin office assigned one of its system engineers, Darragh McArdle, to help get operations started. But Guinness was soon technically self-sufficient, thanks to the in-house computing team that it assembled.

One of the new recruits was Don McInnes, who subsequently replaced Pat Stephenson as head of the group. He went to work at St James’s Gate shortly before Guinness took delivery of the 1902. He had qualified as an accountant, then moved into computing operations at Tate & Lyle in London. That company had implemented new sales and payroll applications while he was there. Guinness wanted to automate the same processes. Trade sales accounting came first, using the 1902 to record transactions. A payroll system followed. Both applications went live in 1967.

Chief programmer Donie O’Brien led the team that wrote the software. Other members of the computer group included assistant manager Joe Kinnane and chief systems analyst Ken Meates. Another analyst, Clive Brownlee, later became executive director of the Guinness organisations in Nigeria and in Dublin. Michael Ward was the head of operations, while Enid Wiltshire was in charge of the data preparation equipment.

The brewery phased out paper tape after it adopted punched cards at the start of the 1970s – a time when it was developing new software to facilitate the introduction of a pound made up of 100 pence instead of shillings and pence. It installed card handling equipment that was manufactured by IBM, but compatible with the 1902.

The paper-driven computing era at St James’s Gate was thus short-lived. Guinness veterans still speak highly, however, of the former colleagues who could edit their programs on paper.

(Guinness computer room photograph, featuring Clive Brownlee and Michael Ward in 1966, courtesy of Diageo)

IBM Ireland commissioned photographer Dick Deegan to record a notable arrival at Dublin Airport in the closing weeks of 1960. His pictures show a set of bulky packages beside the cargo aircraft that had transported them. Each contained part of an IBM 650 computer that was bound for the department of the chief accountant in the Electricity Supply Board (ESB).

The 650 was not only the state-owned utility’s first computer. This was also the first computer that IBM had sold in Ireland. It trailed behind a rival manufacturer, International Computers and Tabulators (ICT), which had shipped similar systems to customers in Thurles and Belfast.

The first IBM computer in Ireland arrives at Dublin Airport. The IBM trio holding the sign are (l-r) Ehud Rubenstein, John Moriarty and George Connolly, who was responsible for orders and shipments.
(Photograph by Dick Deegan courtesy of John Moriarty)

The consignment on its way to the ESB offices in Fitzwilliam Street was therefore the first computer in Dublin.

IBM’s product literature did not refer to the 650 as a computer. It usually called the system an ‘automatic calculator’ or a ‘magnetic drum data processing machine’. By any definition, however, this was a stored program computer rather than a mere calculator. Indeed, the 650 was the first IBM computer that was sold for business use as well as for scientific applications.

It belonged to a generation of electronic devices powered by vacuum tubes – or, to be more accurate, by the electric currents inside those tubes, which were also known as valves. The IBM 650 housed an array of tubes that performed calculations with decimal, not binary, digits. It stored data in memory by recording each digit as a pattern of magnetised spots on a rotating metal cylinder. Data input involved converting the encoded information on 80-column punched cards into electrical impulses.

From the corporate IBM perspective, the 650 was a mature product in 1960. The company had started shipping the system to its customers six years earlier and had already announced a more advanced computer – the 1401 – which featured solid-state electronic components in place of the fragile vacuum tubes.

This illustration from an IBM product guide, dated 1955, shows how the 650 performed arithmetic calculations. The magnetic drum was the key component in this process.

For IBM Ireland, however, the 650 was a new technology. The company had opened its Dublin office in 1956. In the following years it delivered electro-mechanical accounting machines – IBM called them ‘unit record equipment’ – to several local customers. But the ESB installation was its first computing project. It brought in two new staff to support the system. Ehud Rubenstein was an experienced hardware engineer from IBM Israel, while Dubliner Noel Peare had acquired programming skills at IBM United Kingdom.

The January 1961 issue of the ESB company journal reported that assembling and testing of the 650 were underway. IBM had also delivered six new punched card accounting machines to work alongside the computer.

The ESB was well acquainted with older forms of data processing. It had used punched card technology to manage customers’ accounts since 1932. It ran card handling equipment supplied by an earlier incarnation of ICT. The workforce in its accounting machine group knew how to prepare, verify, file and retrieve large batches of punched cards.

There would be little change to these procedures when the computer went into service. The IBM 650 was capable of storing data on magnetic tapes, but the ESB chose to entrust all data input and much of its data output to punched cards.

Programming the IBM 650 involved specifying how and when to transfer processing instructions and transaction data to and from designated locations on the magnetic drum. Operating the system was a matter of feeding in one stack of punched cards that held the program, followed by a second stack of cards that contained transaction data. The vacuum tubes then did their arithmetic and the spinning drum recorded the results. This type of batch processing demanded rigorous accuracy.

The ESB entered its computing era with just two in-house programmers – Eamonn Halpin and Tom Bolton. IBM’s John Moriarty and Noel Peare assisted their initial coding efforts.

Electricity billing was the first application on the IBM 650. The programmers combined details of each account with the latest meter readings and the computer calculated how much the customers should pay. Inventory management for the utility’s central and district stores came next. This involved replacing local records with a centralised control system. All stock values and movements were logged on punched cards at head office.

The ESB’s annual report for 1960-61 contained this photograph of a technician working on the IBM 650. Appropriately for a computer on the premises of an electrical utility, he appears to be testing the system’s power unit.
(Photographer unknown. Photograph courtesy of ESB Archives)

By mid-1963, when the billing and stores applications were both up and running, the accounting machine group had accumulated more than one million cards – all stashed in boxes and stored in a single location. The company made little provision for data recovery, but never had to deal with a major calamity.

The ESB did, however, need more computing power. In 1964 it replaced the 650 with two IBM 1401s.

Dublin had more computer installations now. There were IBM 1620s on the campuses of TCD and UCD. The Revenue Commissioners, Jacobs Biscuits, Esso were using ICT 1301s and An Foras Taluntais / The Agricultural Institute ran an Elliott 803B.

Between 1954 and 1962 IBM delivered 650s to almost 2,000 installations around the world – an unprecedented sales achievement for the young computer industry. The IBM 650 at the ESB was the only one ever seen in Ireland.