09 October 1989: E-commerce pioneers assemble
Many businesses were familiar with data communications in 1989, but information transfer from one organisation to another was still rare. The tail end of the 1980s was, however, a time of high expectations for ‘value added’ network services, electronic invoicing between traders and paperless administration methods for importers and exporters. More and more organisations in Ireland were paying attention to international projects, technology trials and standards development. And a small band of early adopters was keen to raise awareness that things were happening inside the country as well.
Against this backdrop a new business association, the EDI Association of Ireland (EDIAI) held its first annual general meeting in Dublin on 09 October 1989. The event followed exploratory meeting in February, which had decided to set up a national forum and information source for anyone with an interest in electronic data interchange (EDI).
The launch of the EDIAI kick-started business-to-business network services in Ireland. Delegates from 42 member companies attended the October meeting. They included the country’s two biggest banks, the top computer vendors, large state-owned enterprises and consulting firms in search of opportunities to sell advice on electronic trading. The attendees exchanged views on the potential to streamline supply chains and international transactions and elected a council to manage the affairs of the new organisation.
EDI was the most prominent form of electronic commerce before that term was invented. It ushered in a new generation of online services. Yet it also retained the top-down rules and centralised controls of old-school telecommunications – bureaucratic and expensive structures that the internet would sweep away in the 1990s.
Ireland was a relative latecomer to EDI. The technology had evolved in industry-specific schemes in areas like automotive manufacturing, chemicals and insurance. Most of the action had taken place among large enterprises and in the larger economies. Most of the existing projects involved proprietary software. Now, however, the United Nations was promoting a common transaction standard known as Edifact and the European Commission was introducing measures to extend the benefits of EDI across more firms and into those countries where it was less common.
One of the innovators in Ireland was Philips Electronics, which had connected the Digital Equipment facility in Galway into its internal transaction processing systems. This facilitated sales of its semiconductors to the computer maker. Another pioneer was Data Packaging, a precision plastics company company in Mullingar, which sent its first electronic invoice to IBM’s personal computer factory in Scotland in June 1989. Cargo Community Systems (CCS), a new Irish company formed by a consortium of airlines and freight forwarders, also had high ambitions. CCS had drawn up plans for an international pilot system, based on Edifact, that would extend EDI into the air cargo industry. Philips was developing some of the enabling software.
The EDIAI drew its first leaders from these projects. It chose Michael Giblin, an Aer Lingus manager who had recently taken charge of CCS, to chair the council. Howard Bell from Philips Electronics became its secretary. The other council members came from AIB, An Post, Arthur Young, Bank of Ireland, Bell Lines, Digital Equipment, EDI Matrix, Eolas and IBM.
The new association surfaced shortly before the first Irish-based EDI service providers. Two state-owned companies were preparing plans in collaboration with partners that already ran EDI operations elsewhere. An Post’s PostGem subsidiary launched its PostEDI service in October and Telecom Eireann’s Eirtrade announced an alternative scheme in the following July. Both companies offered highly structured services for closed user groups. Both targeted supermarket chains and their larger suppliers. The result was separate islands of online activity that both grew rather slowly.
Complicating the picture further, in January 1990 the government instructed Telecom Eireann and An Post to join forces and create a ‘national communications company’ to provide EDI capabilities for the Customs and Excise Service. They proceeded to establish the International Electronic Trading Agency (INET), which set up a managed network to handle electronic versions of import and export documents. The joint venture arrangement not only led to friction between An Post and Telecom. Its commercial implications also sparked dissatisfaction in the EDIAI. Shortly before the INET network went live in April 1991, the association’s council issued a highly critical assessment of the project.
EDI made fitful progress in the early 1990s. The EDIAI commissioned Ernst & Young and Price Waterhouse to survey usage levels in 1991. These consultants reckoned that no more than 100 to 150 businesses were implementing EDI. Edifact turned out to be more complex than its advocates had suggested and more expensive than its adopters had hoped. And when the Single European Market came into effect in January 1993, simplifying cross-border trade overnight, it took most of the urgency out of the scheme to automate customs processes.
Newer technologies overtook EDI in the years that followed. Internet email provided a cheap and easy way for traders to send and receive documents like orders, invoices and statements. Email lacked the focus and sophistication of dedicated EDI services. But it proved to be an adequate alternative for many companies, particularly in manufacturing industry, and was accessible by all. After the World Wide Web took off in mid-decade businesses could also consider more radical approaches to online buying, selling and transaction processing.
In May 1996 the EDIAI changed its name to the Electronic Commerce Association of Ireland (ECAI) and started to recruit members who had not traded online before the internet. Most of the earlier participants were technology specialists, but many of the newcomers came from sales careers. The ECAI remained active until 2001, when it merged quietly into the Irish Internet Association.
Dates To Remember
04 September 1998: ‘The culture was always to “think big” and go for it’
24 November 1997: Inauguration@Cork
September 1997: Online banking – Ready if you want it
September 1992: Glockenspiel falls silent
October 1991: ‘This is text messaging’
17 June 1991: ‘The internet is now available for testing’
19 March 1991: Three software developers. One desk. No chairs.
09 October 1989: E-commerce pioneers assemble
26 January 1984: Hello Macintosh
18 January 1983: ‘Your friendly IBM Personal Computer’
April 1969: 100,000 missing passengers at Dublin Airport
September 1966: Paper-based computing comes to Guinness
December 1960: The first computer installation in Dublin
23 February 1909: A proposed analytical machine
27 July 1866: ‘It is a great work a glory to our age and nation’
Howard Bell
EDIAI honorary secretary
A group of like-minded enthusiasts in Ireland started to discuss EDI in 1987 and formed the EDIAI in 1989. We all came from different businesses and had different backgrounds, but we had one aim in common: to reduce complexity. We wanted to improve the management of our business processes through the deployment of EDI, not only in our own organisations but also with our business partners.
At the time I was working as logistics manager for Philips Ireland and had become familiar with EDI through its parent organisation. In the 1970s Philips had developed internal message standards for exchanging electronic versions of its invoices, payments and orders. By 1989 the company was also heavily involved in the development of the EDIFACT standard.
Manufacturing, commercial, freight forwarders, airlines, banks, customs, standards, software houses, EDI service providers and business consultants were all represented in the EDI Association and on its council. Yes, we all had vested interests but that was never a roadblock in any of the meetings or discussions. There was always open communication with participants eager to help, share information and experiences about EDI.
At the inaugural meeting in October 1989, I was elected to the EDIAI Council as secretary. Besides our day jobs, Council members spent time sharing the EDI story and business benefits through presentations, breakfast meetings and via various business groups. We all realised that a few experts would not be sufficient to reap the benefits of EDI. We needed many!
Michael Giblin
EDIAI chairman
The EDI Association of Ireland was established by a small group of activists, who loosely knew each other from business and through various conferences. The organisational structure that they decided on was a limited liability company. This gave the association the flexibility to undertake activities of a commercial nature.
The need for EDI came about for a variety of reasons. Chief among these was the buyer/supplier relationship, particularly for those trading with multinational companies and especially with US partners. The purchasers were the dominant partners in these relationships and could dictate the terms of trade. The purchaser would also determine how order and other transaction information could be handled in the most efficient manner, often by taking direct input into its computer. This presented many problems, particularly where the supplier had many customers with proprietary systems.
During its first year the EDIAI created a forum to discuss specific technical issues on communications protocols, data standards and security issues. It must be remembered that at this time even professional IT personnel has no exposure to, and little or no expertise in, the technical aspects of EDI. There were also major concerns about legal issues and the need for the development of interchange agreements between corresponding parties. The association therefore decided to bring forward its own standard or specimen interchange agreement.’
© Newsmail 2019
May 1987: ‘I became a missionary for relational databases’
The Dublin office opened in the first week of May. To be more accurate, that was when Oracle Systems Corporation started to rent space for its sole employee in Ireland at a serviced office complex in Lower Fitzwilliam Street. ‘I walked into Clifton House and sat down at a desk on my own,’ Kevin Jones recalls. The biggest name in relational databases had come to town.
In 1987 the centrepiece of Oracle’s product set was version 5.1 of its database management system – a release that featured new enhancements like network connectivity and clustering technology. The company had also introduced the SQL*Plus data access and report writing tool and the SQL*Forms application generator, while its SQL*Design Dictionary offered workbench functionality for software analysts and designers.
The first copy of an Oracle database in the country had arrived in Dublin six years earlier and was labelled version 2. There had never been a version 1, because the California-based corporation was concerned that this description might scare away prospective customers.
Back in 1981 Oracle was still known as Relational Software Inc. and not yet established a direct presence in Europe. But another US technology and business systems company, CACI International, had recently opened an Irish subsidiary. Jones was the senior database designer there.

Kevin Jones at CACI International
‘The division which I was attached to developed internal corporate systems for the entire CACI organisation,’ he says, ‘We took the very innovative decision of adapting the relational model on which to develop the database and systems.’ The parent company shipped Oracle software for this purpose to the Dublin office in Dawson Street. It ran on one of Digital Equipment’s VAX machines.
Kevin Jones had recently quit Aer Lingus after sixteen years at its data processing department. He had worked there on applications for aircraft maintenance and engineering, becoming familiar with IBM’s mainframe-based Information Management System, which incorporated a hierarchical database. CACI persuaded him to move after he attended one of its courses on data modelling. He had been intrigued by the notion that programmers could focus on data instead of always thinking in terms of systems.
The software profession was changing rapidly in the early 1980s. Developers who had previously worked for user organisations were regrouping in a new generation of software product companies. Hundreds of start-ups opened in and around Dublin, aspiring to build, package and export their own applications.
Intelligence Ireland, which created office automation and data communications software, was one of the most dynamic examples of this new breed. Kevin Jones joined the company in 1984. He established a business services group that provided consulting and systems implementation on VAX hardware and Unix-based computers.
In November 1986 this group launched a new selection of relational database services, ranging from analysis and planning to design and application development. Intelligence also announced that it would henceforth act as Oracle’s Irish representative. Kevin Jones had lobbied the corporation to establish the partnership and agreed to report into its Manchester office. This branch had supported the National Institute for Higher Education in Dublin a couple of years earlier, when the college introduced the relational model to its teaching curriculum.
Intelligence and Oracle proceeded to hold a formal launch event for the database management system at the Berkeley Court Hotel in February 1987. Kevin Jones delivered the very first Oracle database course in Ireland in the following month.
‘I became a missionary for relational databases,’ he says, ‘It just seemed like common sense to me to focus on the relationships between things. But I also encountered a lot of technical snobbery around relational databases and heard colleagues saying that something like this could never work.’
The choice of computers that supported the Oracle software was still rather limited and the VAX was still the primary platform. Digital Equipment had recently launched its own Rdb database management system and was steering customers in that direction. The Oracle-Intelligence alliance succeeded, nonetheless, in attracting two prominent Digital users: Avonmore Creameries’ computer centre, where Gerry McEvoy was a relational database enthusiast, and the Electricity Supply Board’s commercial computing service, where Paddy Walsh, Kathleen Rigney and John O’Neill were key contacts. Conveniently for all, the ESB installation was just across the road from Clifton House.
When these organisations signed licence agreements with Oracle, the company decided to put more resources into targeting the VAX customer base in both Ireland and Northern Ireland. It proceeded to set up its own subsidiary. Missionary Jones took the helm in May.

Intelligence Ireland presented the first training course on Oracle’s database technologies at the ESB
Oracle’s customer base grew and soon included Guinness Group, the Department of Defence and Short Brothers. Jennifer Howard joined Oracle Ireland in September 1987 as a technical pre-sales consultant and, over time, built a small team of benchmarking and performance specialists. Before 1987 was out the company had also appointed Louise Howe as its first administrator.
In later years the software giant also located some of its international operations in Ireland, starting with a Unix software porting centre in Blackrock. By 1990, when Oracle announced this investment, the company was rapidly diversifying beyond its core database business and marketing new families of applications software.
Remember how Oracle’s conquest of the database world had begun with a product known as version 2 ? It was surely fitting that, some years after he left the corporation in 1998, Kevin Jones served as chairman and managing director of a company called Version 1 Software.
© Newsmail 2017
26 January 1984: Hello Macintosh
The ‘1984’ television advertisement announced the coming of the Apple Macintosh during the Super Bowl match in Florida on Sunday 22 January. Steve Jobs unveiled the system at the Flint Center, Cupertino two days later. And the Irish launch of the new product followed at Scruffy Murphys pub in Dublin on Thursday.
Everything that Apple Computer did in the third week of 1984 was radically different from the way that IBM had introduced its IBM Personal Computer – the world’s then-dominant desktop system – which had arrived in Ireland one year earlier.
Ridley Scott’s ‘1984’ video depicted a totalitarian world and an act of resistance that had nothing to do with desktop systems. Then Steve Jobs broke all the conventions for a computer demonstration. He inserted a floppy disk into the new Apple machine and let it introduce itself, running a series of screenshots and a text-to-speech capability straight out of science fiction. And where IBM had left non-Americans waiting for the PC for more than a year, the Macintosh would go on sale in Europe at the same time as in the US.
Apple had chosen Cork as its European manufacturing base in 1980. Three years later the factory management established a sales and distribution organisation for Ireland. By then the Apple Lisa had shown the world how a graphical user interface could transform a personal computer. The more affordable Macintosh was also on the horizon.
Apple’s previous distributor, Softech, had focused on educational users and won a government contract to supply an Apple II computer to every second-level school in the country. When the new sales subsidiary opened an office in Dublin, most of its staff were former photocopier salesmen. The new regime, led by managing director Brian Kelly, wanted to reach more business users.
In November 1983 Brian Kelly, Bob Taylor and Brendan O’Sullivan from Apple Computer Sales travelled to Hawaii for an internal Apple presentation of the Macintosh. Other attendees included Lotus Development founder Mitch Kapor, who promised that Lotus 1-2-3 would be available on the Mac, and Bill Gates who promised a Mac edition of Microsoft Word. Apple was now pressing other developers to produce more applications.
The company had little software to demonstrate, apart from its own personal productivity applications, at the official launch in January 1984. It announced, however, that over 100 software companies were preparing products.
Scruffy Murphys was near the Apple office in Mount Street Crescent. Some of the company’s press and business contacts used to drink there, so it booked the pub’s upstairs room for the launch. There was space for around 50 people, a screen on which to show the Ridley Scott advertisement and a single Macintosh computer. Brian Kelly picked it up and declared ‘Here it is’.
It was only four months since the first deliveries of the Lisa in Ireland, so the concept of the graphical user interface with a mouse to point and click was still very novel, even among the Apple resellers at the launch event. The cost of a Lisa was £8,250, while the Mac would sell for less than £2500 – relatively affordable, perhaps, but not yet priced to suit the broad masses.
Apple did not set a sales target for Brian Kelly’s team. The company promoted the new product as a computer for businesses, professional users and third level students and encouraged its dealers to find early adopters.
The first Macintosh shipments followed in April 1984. The dealers soon discovered the limitations of the first version with its 9-inch monochrome screen, 128K of RAM and floppy disks that held just 400K of data files. But demand picked up when hardware enhancements and software packages came on stream. Desktop publishing became a major application for system after Aldus Corporation introduced PageMaker in 1985.
Four decades after the launch at Scruffy Murphys Apple is continuing to expand the capabilities of the Macintosh. Users can now choose among the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iMac, Mac mini, Mac Studio and Mac Pro variants.
IBM, in contrast, sold off its PC business 20 years ago.
Brian Kelly
Apple Computer Sales
I joined Apple in June 1983. There was no European sales structure at the time and there were very few dealerships. The people who ran the factory in Cork hired me and I was initially based there. The company was still selling mainly Apple IIs and delivering machines under a schools contract. The Apple III was available but didn’t bite. Lisa had also arrived and broke the ground for the Mac. Having seen the Lisa we were already acclimatised to mouse clicks.
That summer I went to Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, met Steve Jobs and saw a Macintosh prototype with a gaping hole where the floppy disk drive was going to go. Apple was waiting to install the first 3.5 inch disks. It was a terrific piece of technology looking for a solution.
There was no real launch plan and we didn’t know when it would happen. Cork, however, was very involved in the manufacturing preparations.
When we unveiled the Macintosh in January people were wowed by it. But the big challenge for us was to show real applications on the machine. We were competing with everyone being fixated on the IBM PC and Apple products were relatively expensive. The Apple III cost about £1800 and the Mac started at £2200 to £2300.
Apple pressed developers to produce more applications. Aldus PageMaker, Adobe’s fonts technology and the first laser printers eventually brought in desktop publishing and drove the success of the Macintosh.
Brendan O’Sullivan
Apple Computer Sales
Steve Jobs had introduced the Mac by emphasising it’s ‘lift-ability’ as he removed it from the Macintosh carry case, inserted a floppy disk and let it introduce itself. When we launched the Mac in Scruffy Murphys we used a similar approach.
However it was only two days after the official launch in USA so we didn’t have the fancy demo floppy that Jobs had. Instead Brian Kelly revealed the Mac from inside the Mac carry case and I proceeded to demonstrate MacPaint and MacWrite (the only apps that worked on the Mac at intro) as the attendees thronged around the solitary Mac we had to show.
The attendees were blown away by the fact that you could ‘see’ a document on the screen and this new fangled device called a mouse allowed you to point at the document and it ‘opened’ a sheet of text that you could type on. Then you could open another document and draw pictures!! Throw in the fact that for the first time you had type that was not just one fixed text but things called typefaces plus sound and the Mac really did solicit a sense of wonder from those who were there.
Gerry Hurley
Computing Workshop
My Apple story began in 1983 at the Computex exhibition in the RDS. No Mac, but two Lisas made their debut, one at the new Apple Sales stand, and the other at Lewis Leith’s Softech … cheekily imported to show that they would not be silenced by Apple’s new corporate presence on their turf.
Computing Workshop became an Apple reseller in mid-1984. As a recent architecture graduate, my intention was to champion the Mac approach to computing to Ireland’s architecture and design practices. One of my first prospective clients, Hugh Skinner, surprised me by asking if he could join my efforts.
Soon after, Bob Taylor and Brendan O’Sullivan at Apple Sales brought us in to show us the first LaserWriter with a beta version of Aldus PageMaker. They were unsure of the prospects for such an expensive setup in the Irish market but, as designers, we knew this was truly a game-changer.
Shifting focus to sell mainly desktop publishing systems, we became aware of the scale of the Irish print and publishing industry, and we found a ready market for the camera-ready 300dpi output of the laser printer. Early sales included Irish Times, Youth Employment Agency, IDA, Bord Fáilte, CTT, Denton Print and Trinity College, and then came the explosion of interest from printers, newspapers and companies across the country.
I now live near Washington DC and work part-time at an Apple Store as a great way to keep connected to the amazing Mac user base.
.
Liam O’Regan
QTH Electronics
It wasn’t hard to become an Apple dealer. QTH started with a shop on Dun Laoghaire, selling Commodore, Sinclair, Atari and Dragon computers as well. In 1983 we sold three or four of the very expensive Apple Lisas.
Because I had experience of Lisa, and because I had read so much about the Macintosh in computer magazines and trade publications, I wasn’t blown away when Apple gave me a preview. But I liked what it could do and I could see where it was going.
There was a lot of interest in the system after the launch. People just wanted to see it and we spent a lot of time showing it off. But when the first Macs were delivered, the only software available was MacWrite and MacDraw – and they were really the same application. We drew a lot of pictures and made a lot of posters, filling the QTH shop window with pages from a dot matrix printer.
The first Macintosh I sold went to the Country Cellar in Dun Laoghaire – a shop that sold home brew kits and health foods.
People could do more with the system after Microsoft released Word and the Multiplan spreadsheet. But they needed a second disk drive to make it practical. Then the Profile – Apple’s external hard disk drive – came out. The costs of disk drives and printers pushed up the price of a system.
QTH grew in the 1980s, selling home computers as well as the Macintosh. I liked the technical side of the business and spent more and more time supporting customers and fixing their systems. I kept working in that area until 2018 and made a living from the Macintosh for more than thirty years.
© TechArchives 2024
18 January 1983: ‘Your friendly IBM Personal Computer’
IBM Ireland’s Tony Furlong announced the release of the IBM Personal Computer on 18 January 1983 at one of a series of simultaneous events across Europe. The company, he said, was aiming its latest system at first timers and advanced users alike. It expected to win orders from a mix of small businesses, educational establishments and individuals. And it was planning to make the first shipments on 28 February.
The original IBM PC was based on a 16-bit Intel microprocessor and had no fixed disk for data storage. Customers could choose between models with one 5.25 inch diskette drive or two. The system’s maximum capacity, using two double-sided diskettes, was 640 KB.
A basic configuration plus a dot matrix printer cost less than £5,000.
IBM was a late arrival at the personal computing party and the launch followed months of speculation about its manufacturing and distribution strategies for Europe. Right from the start the PC attracted more public attention than any previous IBM computer.
The microcomputer trade that had emerged in the late 1970s was thriving in 1983. Up to then, however, it had been dominated by specialist manufacturers such as Apple, Commodore and Sord, while a new generation of sales outlets had driven the business in Ireland – upstarts like Softech, Lendac Data Systems and QTH Electronics. Their customers came from small businesses, schools and colleges instead of from workplaces with large data processing budgets or teams of programmers and computer operators.
Digital Equipment, ICL and other old-guard vendors were also unveiling new desktop computers at this time. But IBM’s entry to the personal systems business sent out a deeper message. Computer managers had an adage that none of them would ever be fired for buying from IBM. Now IBM was recommending that they include PCs in their data processing plans. Micros were not just classroom gadgets any more. IBM had models that were fit for business computing.
The PC, furthermore, promised to turn regular office employees into hands-on computer users. IBM threw its marketing weight behind this trend. The key word in its PC sales campaign was ‘friendly’. IBM highlighted the computer’s easy-to-play keyboard, easy-to-read display screen and easy-to-use printer. It also assured potential buyers that this computer did not require air conditioning. ‘If you’re comfortable, the IBM Personal Computer will be comfortable,’ its sales handout read.
Most of the company’s publications in those times showed air-conditioned computer rooms with rows of processors and peripherals. The PC brochures were designed around a set of cartoon characters.
This new approach was strongly influenced by IBM’s experience in the US, where it unveiled the PC back in August 1981 and had already grabbed a dominant share of the total market. The company integrated the most effective aspects of the American roll-out into its European launch plan. Initially, indeed, it imported the systems themselves from the US. An IBM factory in Scotland took over PC assembly for Europe in 1984.

Tony Furlong, who presided at the IBM PC launch in Dublin, later became the managing director of IBM Ireland.
As Tony Furlong explained at the Dublin launch, IBM would distribute the Personal Computer through two channels – the company’s own sales force and a new set of accredited resellers. IBM Ireland, in fact, had appointed its first dealers back in summer 1982 – three firms from very different backgrounds. Cara Data Processing was a big name in computer bureau services. Enniscorthy-based Datapac had sold and supported IBM’s golfball typewriters. Tomorrows World ran a store on Grafton Street selling electronic devices.
One of the conditions for accreditation, based on IBM’s practices in the US, was that each dealer would set up a showroom for product demonstrations. IBM’s Irish partners complied with this rule, but most of them grumbled that they could land orders from business customers just as easily without spending money on retail spaces.
The IBM PC could run two operating systems but, applying another lesson from America, the company intended to concentrate on just one. It gave priority to PC-DOS, which a little-known outfit named Microsoft had developed. The alternative, CP/M-86, came from Digital Research which until then had been the industry leader in operating systems for desktop computers.
By the second half of 1983 IBM had delivered the Personal Computer XT, which featured a hard drive and an enhanced version of PC-DOS, and its dealer network had expanded to eleven partners around the country.
The limited range of applications software for PC-DOS – accounting packages and spreadsheets in particular – was, however, holding back sales. The typical buyer had little interest in the games and typing tutors in IBM’s catalogue.
There was also a scarcity of information about the number of sales in Ireland. One estimate at the end of 1983 suggested that, in total, between 2,500 and 3,000 personal computers were bought that year. IBM’s share was probably in the low hundreds.
Nonetheless, its combination of Intel processors and a Microsoft operating system established a blueprint for other manufacturers to follow. Most of the other PC makers adapted their machines to be IBM-compatible in the mid-1980s. And the IBM-compatible PC became the iconic technology of that decade.
David Little
Cara Data Processing manager
IBM selected the first three agencies in Ireland for the PC around six months before the product launch in January 1983. I had the task of setting up a new division: Cara Microsystems.
IBM’s thinking, I believe, was that Cara would focus on enterprise customers, Tomorrows World on consumers and Datapac on regional sales. Due to some administration error within IBM, the three of us received letters with the correct addresses but the wrong peoples’ names. Cara’s letter of appointment was addressed to Neville Kutner, who was the principal at Tomorrows World !
IBM Ireland mandated that PC dealers should sell its product from retail premises – presumably because microcomputers were regards as advanced office machines like typewriters. Accordingly we did up the first floor of Cara’s new headquarters in Fenian Street as quite a smart retail outlet – very bright and with bold colours. I am not sure we ever made a sale on the ‘retail’ premises but the new business began to thrive.
David Laird
Datapac managing director
Datapac applied to be an IBM typewriter dealer in 1981. We reckoned that we would have a foot in the door when IBM appointed PC dealers in the near future. This proved to be the case. Datapac went on to submit an application for a PC dealership. Dick Cahill and William Burgess at IBM vetted us and we became one of the first three dealers in January 1983.
The initial appointments effectively created a Dublin market for two Dublin based dealers and the rest of the country for us in Datapac. We took advantage of this finding customers such as Pfizer, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Travenol in Castlebar and many other organisations throughout Ireland.
Our first customer for an IBM PC was Yates Industries Ireland, who were based in Little Island, Cork. Cathal O’Connor was the CEO, and he travelled to Enniscorthy to collect the PC. It was the original model with one 160k diskette drive, and I can remember a long discussion around whether to buy a second diskette drive, providing a total of 320k of storage.
Declan Ganter
Business Automation director
Business Automation applied to become a reseller before the product launch. IBM did not initially accept us, but it authorised the company soon after the PC began to ship.
Most of our early sales of the IBM PC were single systems running financial applications. The total cost of a computer, dot matrix printer, accounting software and a spreadsheet in the mid-1980s was typically about £9,000.
© TechArchives 2023
23 May 1978: ‘I gave a lot of demonstrations where I switched off that computer after 45 minutes’
Computex 1978 ran for three days in May in the Fitzwilliam suite of the Burlington Hotel. This exhibition aimed to attract potential computer buyers, especially from small and medium size businesses that could not have afforded the systems of earlier years. Computex not only showcased the minicomputer hardware and software that were boosting the adoption of data processing. It also offered visitors an early glimpse of smaller, simpler and even less expensive microprocessor-based machines – microcomputers such as the Apple II.
Stand 38 was the furthest from the entrance. Budget Computing had decked it out to resemble a fruit stall with streamers and real edible apples. The company had recently become Apple Computer’s representative in Ireland. It took space at Computex to run the first public Apple II demonstrations in the country – just over one year after the launch of the product in the US.

Here is how Budget Computing announced Apple’s arrival in the exhibition catalogue for Computex 1978. The published text understated the available RAM. The Apple II started with 4K of memory and could expand to 48K.
Microcomputers were largely the preserve of electronics hobbyists. Many were sold in the form of kits and the buyers had to assemble and configure the hardware. Other suppliers provided complete systems, but they still expected users to have some programming ability.
Several examples were on display at the Burlington. A British company, Rapid Recall, was showing a selection of microcomputer and memory products made by Intel. Hewlett-Packard’s 9845S desktop computer offered on-screen graphics as well as ‘computational capabilities’. Ballsbridge-based Addac Computers presented the Mael 2841 from Italy, featuring 8K of memory, a twin floppy disk drive and printer, for an all-in price of £8,500.
The Apple II cost around a fifth of this price when attached to consumer devices instead of combined with computer peripherals. Budget Computing demonstrated the original model with a Toshiba television set as its screen and audio cassettes for data storage. It was powered by MOS Technology’s 6502 microprocessor and contained just 4K of RAM (expandable to 48K). But its built-in version of the Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC) programming language and its ability to display colour graphics positioned the Apple II at the cutting edge of the microcomputer trade.
‘Personal computers in that era required considerable technical knowledge and were generally unreliable,’ recalls Budget Computing co-founder Lewis Leith, ‘One of our first Apple machines would work for about 50 minutes and then fail. I gave a lot of demonstrations where I switched off that computer after 45 minutes.’
Budget Computing knew how to handle microcomputer technologies. Founded in 1976, the Dublin company imported hardware from Southwest Technical Products Corporation in Texas before it teamed up with Apple. This was a part-time activity for both of its co-founders. Brendan Jordan, who worked at Dunsink Observatory, assembled the machines on his kitchen table. Lewis Leith, a computer science lecturer at TCD, was responsible for sales.

The original Apple II – seen here with the cover removed – offered a generous selection of expansion slots, but did not yet support disk storage when it made its Irish debut.
Photograph courtesy of Steven Stengel at http://oldcomputers.net
They were well aware that these products were not yet suitable for business applications. Almost all of the 25 Southwest machines that they sold went into schools. Members of the Computer Education Society of Ireland were beginning to experiment with computers in their classrooms. Teachers found uses for, and shared their experiences with, the low-cost hardware that Leith and Jordan supplied.
In October 1977 the Budget Computing duo travelled to the Personal Computing Expo at New York Coliseum in order to check out alternative products.
According to Lewis Leith, Apple was not the obvious winner among the exhibitors, but it had the technology that his customers needed. Being able to switch on the machine and to start coding in BASIC straight away would seem like a great leap forward for them. The teachers were, indeed, impressed. A handful of hobbyists placed orders as well.
The Apple II matured rapidly. Soon it was shipped with monitors and floppy disks. Users and resellers started to release software applications. And Apple’s microcomputer began to penetrate workplaces after the VisiCalc spreadsheet and the Apple Writer word processor emerged.
Softech, the successor company to Budget Computing, opened an office in Camden Street in 1979 and was soon shipping 50 systems a month – 0.5% of Apple’s global sales. Softech subsequently separated its wholesale and retail operations, developed educational applications and started to export its software via Apple partners.
Computex became an annual event and expanded into much larger venues in the 1980s. Apple grew bigger too.
Lewis Leith
Budget Computing co-founder
Steve Jobs himself gave product demonstrations at the Personal Computing show in New York. I visited the Apple stand several times during its three day run, studying the exciting Apple II and watching how he presented it.
At the end of the show I arranged with Apple to become its agent in Ireland. We made the first sale or two before Computex.
All of the early Apples went to schools and to teachers who ran programming classes. There wasn’t any applications software for them yet.
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October 1977: ‘The only mini thing about it was that it came from the Digital stable’
The 1980s are often remembered as the era of the personal computer. Throughout that decade, however, most organisations in Ireland conducted their affairs with minicomputer hardware and software. And the pre-eminent system in this country had far more processing power than any PC.
Digital Equipment launched its VAX platform in the US in October 1977. The product was a slow starter. More than a year elapsed before the first VAX delivery to an Irish customer. And it was only in the following decade – after Digital enhanced the system with a relational database, transaction processing capabilities and a compiler for Cobol programmers – that the orders flooded in.
‘The availability of the VAX computer from the late 1970s was crucial to our success, recalls Frank Brennan, who was an account manager in Digital Equipment Ireland at the time of the product launch, ‘Referred to sometimes as a “super minicomputer”, in reality the only mini thing about it was that it came from the Digital stable.’
The uptake of the VAX by private companies was respectable, but its success in the public sector was truly spectacular. The Department of Social Welfare forged its information processing strategy around the platform and rolled out applications on multiple VAX clusters. Digital’s system became the computer of choice for the country’s hospitals and health boards. The Central Statistics Office profiled the nation with VAX technology. The Ordnance Survey mapped its territory. The Meteorological Service produced weather forecasts. The Electricity Supply Board and Bord Gais Eireann supplied Ireland’s energy. The state agencies responsible for economic development, science and technology policy, skills training and tourism all installed VAX systems. So did airports manager Aer Rianta, car ferry operator B+I Line and public transport authority CIE. And VAX machines pumped data around almost every university campus.
There was a political element at play behind this dominance. Government agencies and state-owned companies were positively disposed towards Digital because the corporation located a high proportion of its European operations in this country. Their computer buyers came to regard its technology as a safe choice. In addition, the tactical skills of Digital’s sales organisation reinforced the success of the VAX. Most important of all, perhaps, this range of systems offered processing power on a scale that was right for Ireland.
Computing was underdeveloped in the public sector compared with other countries because the information management workloads were smaller. It was never easy to justify investing in high-performance mainframes in Ireland. The less powerful, but more affordable, minicomputers that Digital Equipment supplied were more appropriate. The pricing and the processing capacity of the VAX family were suitable for supporting state services for a population which, in the 1980s, was only around 3.5 million.

The engineering and production team behind the first made-in-Galway VAX 11/780. This photograph shows the computer and its peripherals, fully configured and ready to ship, in November 1978.
(Photograph courtesy of Enda Folan. Photographer unknown.)
VAX stood for ‘Virtual Address eXtension’ – the innovation that enabled Digital to introduce 32-bit addressing and to make a 32-bit computer commercially available before any other manufacturer. The name of its VMS operating system referenced ‘virtual memory system’. Digital started the development of these technologies in 1975 under the direction of vice president of engineering Gordon Bell. He had participated in the design of the company’s older PDP machines and the model number of the first VAX – 11/780 – signified that it was partially compatible with the widely installed PDP-11. The corporate announcement of VAX and VMS took place at a shareholders’ event on 25 October 1977.
Digital Equipment personnel in Galway first heard about the 11/780 through its codename ‘Star’.
The company had opened its first European manufacturing facility in the western city in 1971. This operation initially assembled computers out of parts that Digital flew in from the US. By 1977 Galway had started to make power supplies for the computers and to select and test other components – including metal parts, wiring harnesses and some of the more common integrated circuits – from suppliers in Europe. The introduction of the ‘Star’ coincided with a deepening of Galway’s sourcing, assembly and configuration capabilities.
The new system would require two production teams – one to assemble and test the central processing unit and the second to configure computers and peripherals according to customer specifications. Digital appointed a management team for VAX manufacturing, led by John Eyres, in early 1978. It started to select and train technicians and assemblers in April, obtaining support from an American facility that was already shipping VAX equipment. The company set target dates of September for the construction of the first ‘Star’ processor in Europe and November for the shipment of the first complete configuration. The Galway teams achieved both targets.
The first VAX 11/780 delivery to an installation in Ireland followed just before Christmas at University College Cork. Software tools for the new machine were still hard to find, but that was not a major concern for academic users. In the early weeks of 1979 the computer science department at Trinity College Dublin became the first Irish customer to commence operations on a VAX. An industrial dispute involving a company that maintained the lifts on the Cork campus had delayed the commissioning of its new computer.
Digital was already the foremost supplier of university computers in Ireland before the VAX 11/780. There was no precedent, however, for a single computer vendor to win the majority of contracts across the public sector as a whole. The VAX family made history in the 1980s by achieving that. For more than a decade it would be the computer that governed Ireland.
Fred Bowers
Digital Equipment manufacturing process engineer (Maynard, Massachusetts)
When I think of the VAX, I only think of Gordon Bell. The technical and business success of the VAX was an amazing journey from concept to reality that took at least ten years. And it all happened in Gordon Bell’s head.
On a Friday evening after work in the mid 1970s I went to The Avalon Club, a pub across from the Maynard Mill, as my whole department always did. My boss came in and gathered the group together like it was a staff meeting. He was really hyped. He said “Gordon Bell has an idea for a new computer that is going to change the company forever. Gordon laid out the specifics of it today for the engineering managers. It is going to challenge our capabilities in every parameter.”
Looking back on it, we had almost two years to create the processes needed for VAX which made us pretty much state of the art upon the introduction of the system. My recollection was that the introduction was relatively smooth. Gordon was never known for rigid organization, but rather for inspiration and conceptualization. People followed him because he was a genius, not because he was structured.
Thousands of brilliantly talented people worked to carry out the concept plan. I think that Gordon had little to do with that. But it was like watching a symphony orchestra playing a concerto that Mozart spent ten years imagining, developing, and finally scoring so that the best musicians could play it.
Frank Brennan
Digital Equipment account manager (Dublin)
I can’t remember if we had any advance information on VAX before its announcement in October 1977 as the VAX 11/780, but if we did, it was not much.
It might be surprising now, but in Park House we had somewhat mixed reactions to the announcement. We had significant emotional investment in the 36-bit DECsystem-20 (successes already in the universities and the Met Office), and feared, quite rightly, that the VAX would be developed at the expense of the DECsystem.
This concern was very short-lived, as we came to appreciate the potential of the VAX. By the end of 1977, we were starting to realise that the versatile PDP-11 had its limitations – in high throughput applications, 16-bit addressing could be a bottleneck. The VAX 11/780 had a PDP-11 compatibility mode, so we now had an elegant upgrade path for the latter.
Also, the VAX and its VMS operating system had been developed in tandem, so this was brand new cost effective technology, eminently saleable to larger users. This was immediately the case in the third-level education and technical sectors, and as additional software was released, VAX also became a best seller for administrative and commercial customers.
John Eyres
Digital Equipment VAX 11/780 manufacturing manager (Galway)
I was the manufacturing engineering manager at Digital, responsible for new product introduction and technical support of the various production areas. I knew about the VAX 11/780 before October 1977 – it was code named VAX Star – though we were kept at arm’s length when we broached the question of a start-up in Galway. After the official announcement the local management team realised that this new computer was destined to be Digital’s flagship product, but nothing on its scale and complexity had been introduced in Galway before. They decided they needed an experienced dedicated project manager. I had the requisite experience and was invited to take on this challenge.
In all previous new product introductions we were supplied with kits of modules and other materials for the first month’s production in order to facilitate debugging and to reduce the learning curve. Such was the customer demand for VAX in the US, however, that no similar commitment was forthcoming for at least a year. Despite the daunting task of managing the assembly and test of 20 different large CPU modules and power supply units (which were significant products in themselves), it was decided to forge ahead without kits, but to be prudent with the ramp rate.
We had an excellent training department in Galway managed by John Lewis. He sent technical trainers to the US to study the functionality of the CPU modules and of the new operating system VMS. The goal was to teach the start-up technicians the theory in Galway and follow up with practical training in the US.
In May 1978 we moved into the implementation phase with a goal of first European customer shipment in November. The first CPU from the basic assembly and test area was completed in September. This CPU formed the core of the first customer shipment from the final assembly and test area. This was delivered on schedule two months later, together with all its peripheral devices.
Looking back at what we took on for such a young bunch of guys (I was the oldest at 33), all I can say is that it was great to be young and to be given such an opportunity. We were all driven by a continuous improvement attitude and by the desire to show what Digital Galway was capable of.
Enda Folan
Digital Equipment VAX mechanical engineering manager (Galway)
The 11/780 was the first VAX system for which Galway did the full vertical integration, building each machine to customer specifications. I was the engineer who created all the bills of materials that Digital used for manufacturing and purchasing the parts for these computers.
Sourcing more materials in Europe was a subset of the VAX project in Galway. This activity had duty advantages for Digital and it also meant that the company gained second suppliers for some of the parts. We had done a little sourcing in Europe for the PDP range, although we started by buying locally lead bars that were too heavy for shipping by air. With the VAX we stepped up this activity and started to qualify components at board level.
My staff consisted of two engineering technicians – one for hardware and one for software. They were part of a gang from Galway that went to Salem, Massachusetts for VAX training. Later on they became troubleshooters who dealt with field service and the US on a regular basis.
Salem was already shipping the new computers to Digital’s American customers when the trainees went over. The earliest VAX systems in Europe were also assembled there, before Galway made its first delivery in November 1978.
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