Anniversaries 1970-1989

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.

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.

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.

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.