Anniversaries 1990-1999

International agreements were usually much more complicated. This one stated, essentially, that the governments of Ireland and the United States both believed that electronic commerce was a good thing and that both would support the practice. In 1998, however, their joint communiqué was a genuine world first. President Bill Clinton and Taoiseach Bertie Ahern were the first political leaders to use cryptographic software for signing an intergovernmental document.

This event marked a major strategic move for Baltimore Technologies – the company whose software made it possible. And it happened at a crucial time in the evolution of the Dublin-based firm.

Baltimore Technologies had started life in 1976 as Chaco Computer Consultants, but kept a fairly low profile for its first 20 years. Its founder, Michael Purser, was a TCD computer science lecturer and Baltimore’s services drew on his deep mathematical knowledge. By the early 1990s the company had become a specialist in network security and data encryption. It had undertaken consultancy work for the European Commission and won development contracts from European governments, network operators and financial institutions. It had also begun to channel its security expertise into software products.

Baltimore’s customers included a bank in Geneva that introduced it to investor Dermot Desmond and alerted him to its potential. In November 1996 his company, International Investment & Underwriting, supported a buyout of the firm and brought in a new management team. This change of ownership transformed the organisation.

It launched a public key infrastructure (PKI) system, UniCert, that managed the digital certificates used for authentication purposes and for restricting access to sensitive data.

By autumn 1998 Baltimore Technologies had signed up more than 50 resellers and implementation partners for UniCert around the world. It had opened sales offices in London, Tokyo and Amsterdam and on both coasts of the United States. It was now vying with Entrust Technologies, a subsidiary of Nortel, to lead the market in encryption tools for internet applications.

Its workforce, which had expanded to 80 people, believed that PKI management would become as universal as database management and that their company was going to be as influential as Oracle in the software industry.

‘The culture at Baltimore was always to “think big” and go for it,’ recalls Paddy Holahan, one of the senior managers that the new owners brought in. ‘With President Clinton coming to Ireland we were encouraged to try to put Baltimore at the centre of something that would not just be a local event.’

The presidential visit was scheduled for the first week of September. Fran Rooney, Baltimore’s chief executive, and Brendan Tuohy, secretary general of the Department of Public Enterprise, drew up an idea for the Irish and US governments to release a communiqué on e-commerce, signed with digital security technologies instead of pen and ink. Then they got support for this plan from a senior policy adviser to President Clinton.

Step-by-step explanation of the signing procedure from a briefing document for the ceremony. See also a video of the event here.

PKI was well suited to the management of official documents. Their contents could not be altered without detection after digital signatures were attached. But the documents could still be copied and distributed as widely as required. Baltimore’s UniCert would generate digital certificates to identify President Clinton and Taoiseach Ahern. Those certificates could be stored on smart cards and the signing process would take the form of a card transaction.

The scene was set for a Baltimore Technologies showcase in front of an invited audience and the international media that accompanied the American president. PC maker Gateway agreed to host the event at its facility in Clonshaugh. The politicians played their roles on cue and all the technology worked fine.

It was inconvenient, however, that the digital signing process was more or less instantaneous. For optical purposes Baltimore devised a special piece of animation that showed the transfer of the signatures from the cards to the document. This display prolonged the ceremony and created a sense of occasion.

In hindsight the most interesting aspect of the communiqué was the roles that it prescribed for governments in the evolving infrastructure for internet-based transactions: providing a clear legal framework, promoting a pro-competitive environment and ensuring adequate protection of public interest objectives such as privacy, intellectual property rights and consumer protection. The intergovernmental agreement also asserted that taxes on e-commerce should be consistent and non-discriminatory.

Baltimore was preparing to make its stock market debut when it orchestrated the signing ceremony. The event not only served to attract potential customers to the company. It also alerted international investors to its existence.

Three months later the company announced that it would merge with Zergo Holdings, a London-based cryptographic product supplier and information security consultancy. Zergo was already listed on the London Stock Exchange. The partners completed this transaction in January 1999 and the combined organisation traded as Baltimore Technologies.

The merger was followed by four turbulent years of rapid expansion, dramatic contraction and a succession of asset disposals. As a publicly quoted company, Baltimore’s drama played out under an international spotlight. The technology behind UniCert underwent multiple ownership changes and now belongs to Utah-based DigiCert.

At its peak, however, Baltimore Technologies was a name to be reckoned with. So it is worth remembering how, 20 years ago, the company succeeded in turning arcane mathematical software into prime-time news.

Jack Higgins, the city manager, wanted to know how many information technology companies were active in and around Cork and no one could give him an accurate number. Cork Corporation was preparing a city development plan and he was interested in obtaining some form of input from the IT industry. The computing community, however, lacked a representative voice. The city manager therefore commissioned Cork Business Innovation Centre (BIC) to conduct a survey that would measure the level of IT activity.

The local software profession could trace its roots back to the mid 19th century, when George Boole, whose name lives on in Boolean algebra, was a university professor in the city. University College Cork was also the site of the first computer installation there – an IBM 1620 in 1964. Commercial computing started in the following year with an ICT 1300 on the premises of textile manufacturer Sunbeam Wolsey.

The 21st century was just around the corner when Michael O’Connor at Cork BIC took on the task of profiling the IT industry. He chose to define this terrain very broadly and charted the entire landscape – commercial and academic, locally owned companies and the subsidiaries of multinationals, the computing and network departments in user organisations and the legal and financial practices that advised technology businesses. The study also sounded out the concerns of IT professionals about working in Cork.

A meeting in September 1997 reviewed the findings of this research. The BIC survey indicated that there were about 50 IT firms in the Cork region. Most of these were engaged in software development. They tended to be small and relatively young. One in three of the companies was less than three years old.

The study highlighted a scarcity of suitable office space in the city for small to medium size firms and flagged industry complaints about the quality of internet access – a topical issue at a time when e-commerce was the talk of the trade.

Michael O’Connor’s report also identified that communication among the different subgroups of technology professionals was poor. There was little interaction between native and foreign-owned ventures. Most software product developers were in regular contact with their peers elsewhere, but not with nearby user installations. The September meeting therefore laid the foundations for a forum that would serve all the strands of IT activity and encourage more connections in and around the city.

Picking it@cork as the title of the proposed group was a sign of the times. The internet had recently evolved from a resource for geeks and academics into a milieu for online profit-seeking. A name that included the ‘@’ symbol was like a statement of intent to expand such activity.

The founders of it@cork drew up a scale of membership fees based on company size and compiled a target list of 100 potential participants. They also secured some initial public funding.

The inaugural meeting of it@cork on 24 November 1997 (l-r): Brian Walsh (Alia Iacta Est), Ian O’Flynn (Musgrave Group), Shemas Eivers (Client Solutions), Michael O’Connor (Cork BIC) and Marie Whelan (Murphys Brewery)
(Photograph courtesy of Shemas Eivers. Photographer unknown.)

An inaugural meeting of the new professional association followed on 24 November in Murphy’s Brewery.

it@cork proceeded to organise technical sessions and to promote links between the software and services companies and other businesses, especially the large pharmaceutical companies and financial institutions with local computer installations.

By the end of 1998 the regional IT body had more than 60 member companies, a steering committee and five working groups. An annual it@cork conference became an important fixture in its calendar from 1999 onwards. The industry association continued to thrive in the 21st century.

Cork Corporation and industry investors resolved the office accommodation problem through a public-private partnership. This developed the National Software Centre (NSC) on a campus at Loughmahon with grant support from the European Union. The first tenants moved into the NSC in 2001.

There is nothing unusual about launching a new venture over a pint. But it@cork is truly entitled to boast that it was born in a brewery. The association recorded its creation with a formal photograph that shows five well groomed founders clutching the product of the establishment that hosted its inaugural event. The man from Musgraves is the only one who appears to have taken a sip !

Ireland’s first internet-based banking service for personal customers never had a launch event. Nor was there an official start date for Banking 365 On-line. It began with a small number of web users viewing their account balances or checking the status of specific payments. They were not yet able to conduct any transactions over the internet.

In September 1997 these pilot trials segued into an offering for the wider population of Bank of Ireland customers. Anyone who had an existing account and access to the internet could apply to use it.

The bank was very aware of the fallibility of dial-up internet connections and how these shortcomings might dampen interest in the service. It therefore treated web banking as a niche option. A recently established telephone-based service would cater for the mainstream of personal customers. This service was well resourced and well managed from a call centre in Tallaght. Head office regarded phone banking as a success.

Banking 365 On-line would, in time, become a much greater landmark in financial services and, indeed, in the uptake of online applications in Ireland.

Digital Equipment deserved much of the credit. Joe Farrell, technical account manager at the company’s sales office in Dublin, set the project in motion in 1996, when he alerted Bank of Ireland to the emergence of new internet technologies and applications in the US.

Digital was keen to promote its internet credentials in the mid-1990s. Its AltaVista Software business unit in California had developed the world’s leading internet search engine and was building up a suite of related products. The company organised a study tour on the US west coast for a delegation from the bank. Digital not only showed off its own operations and capabilities to this group, but also arranged meetings at partner companies like Netscape Communications and Oracle. Another stop on the itinerary was Wells Fargo Bank, which already had an internet banking capability. Wells Fargo even had a chief scientist of its own.

The Bank of Ireland group included its internet programme manager Alan Shanley, business analyst Shay Farrelly, Frank Brennan from the ‘design office’ that managed the bank’s IT projects and Richard Nealon from its information security practice. Consultant Kelly Murphy accompanied them. He managed the e-commerce practice at Vision, which advised the bank on business strategies with a software dimension.

The main lesson from the study tour was how inexpensive web servers and free web browsers were transforming the information technology landscape.

Online services in the banking world had a chequered history. Bank of Ireland had tracked how bigger banks in other countries had invested heavily in proprietary software and systems. Such projects tended to be difficult and costly. Internet technologies, especially off-the-shelf products, would be much more affordable.

Market research back home, moreover, indicated that internet adoption had reached a critical mass. By the end of 1996 Ireland’s internet service providers had signed up around 36,000 subscribers.

After the California tour Bank of Ireland allocated £70,000 to the design and testing of a web banking service. Alan Shanley was the project leader and oversaw its business rationale. Frank Brennan managed the IT aspects.

At the start of 1997 the bank announced the pilot phase of this project. Further steps would be determined after consultations with a customer advisory panel. And the service would be known as Banking 365 On-line.

Much of the IT infrastructure for Bank of Ireland’s internet service was already in place at the start of 1997. The project could utilise systems that supported its branch network and the call centre behind the telephone-based Banking 365 service. There were Unix and Microsoft Windows computers connected through a TCP/IP network and an SNA gateway running on DEC hardware led to the bank’s IBM mainframe and its databases. Digital had also delivered an ‘update server’ that enabled operations to recover after faults like network outages.
The addition of an HTTP server to this configuration paved the way for web applications. This dual Pentium Pro computer running Windows NT was positioned between two firewalls in a new subnetwork or ‘demilitarized zone’ (DMZ). The development of a custom middleware layer on a Unix server facilitated message exchanges across the different communications protocols. This ‘mapper’ hid the details of encoding and decoding the fields in requests and responses.
(Illustration courtesy of Alan Bateman)

Digital Equipment, Netscape Communications and Vision supplied pieces of the technology jigsaw, which involved servers, middleware, communications protocols and data security components from multiple sources. Its centrepiece was a new HTTP server to manage the web content – a Digital computer running Netscape Enterprise Server.

Peter Shaw from Bank of Ireland was responsible for the web site design. The project team used Netscape’s LiveWire Pro visual development environment with assistance from a Netscape consultant.

Banking 365 On-line recycled elements of the telephone-based system. In particular Digital’s DECmessageQ middleware, which allowed agents at the call centre to access customer accounts on the bank’s mainframe systems, was enhanced to display the same information on a web page. The internet service also reused a registration database that recorded the accounts and services used by phone banking customers, together with their personal IDs and passwords.

Digital assigned middleware and Unix specialists to system integration, writing application programming interfaces that linked Netscape Enterprise Server software with DECmessageQ. This was a time when messaging middleware still required a custom layer on top to make it suitable for high level application development.

Online security was another priority. It was also an area where geopolitics impacted on IT professionals. US regulations prohibited the export of advanced encryption products whose long key lengths were regarded as unbreakable. Cryptography practitioners elsewhere were restricted to shorter keys and feared that these were increasingly vulnerable.

Trinity College Dublin lecturer Michael Purser, working as a commercial consultant, had implemented the 56-bit Data Encryption Standard (DES) for Bank of Ireland’s intranet. The enhancements to the messaging middleware for the web service extended this protection to the HTP server. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), which supported 64-bit encryption, was used to safeguard Netscape Enterprise Server from the external internet.

This combination of DES and SSL proved effective for the first versions of Banking 365 On-line.

The selection of human participants for the pilot trial was less rigorous than the choosing of IT components. There was nothing secret about the project and the bank had gained kudos by making its plans public. In practice, however, the development team never looked far beyond its own families and friends when it recruited testers.

The number of users increased gradually in summer 1997, as more people asked if they could try the service. In September the bank called for another 1,000 customers to volunteer as early adopters, but it was ready to accommodate anyone who wanted to sign up.

By now there was talk of adding interactive features in 1998. Faster, more secure connections were also on the horizon.

Banking 365 On-line was no longer something that was coming shortly. Internet banking had arrived and it would soon become an everyday activity.

The examinership of Glockenspiel had commenced in June. By the autumn rumours suggested that one of the major players in international software was negotiating a rescue package for the Dublin firm. On 28 September 1992 the world’s second largest software corporation announced its acquisition of Glockenspiel.

New York-based Computer Associates (CA) had annual revenues of $1.4 billion. It undertook to continue marketing Glockenspiel’s main products and it offered to retain all of the company’s employees. But this takeover would result in the demise of a unique hub of software creativity in a corner of the inner city that computing professionals did not usually frequent.

John Carolan was already known as a software design and data networking savant when he founded Glockenspiel in 1984. He initially tried to register Fairport as the company’s name and was standing in a phone box in Munich when he learned that this was not available. There was a glockenspiel in front of John when he heard the news.

His agenda was radically different from the rest of the Irish software industry in 1984. Hundreds of small, mostly tiny, firms were building yet another inventory management application or yet another administration package for professional offices. Glockenspiel, in contrast, offered fixed-price, fixed-time development contracts for international customers, based on advanced engineering tools that few programmers anywhere had mastered yet.

The new company aligned itself with Unix and the C programming language. Unix, according to its adherents, had the potential to become a universal operating system that would facilitate the porting of applications from one computing platform to another, including the personal computers that were proliferating at this time.

Bell Labs’ Computing Science Research Center in the US – the home of Unix and C – soon got to hear about the Dublin start-up. When it developed an object-oriented language, C++, it sent one of the first evaluation copies of its compiler to Carolan. He proceeded to implement the new language on PCs before anyone else. Glockenspiel went on to release the world’s first commercial C++ compiler in 1986 and exported its born-in-the-USA software back to America.

Big names like Borland and Symantec soon introduced their own C++ compilers. Glockenspiel, which could not match their sales and distribution capabilities, responded by creating the CommonView toolkit. This C++ development framework reduced the cost of producing new applications by optimising their performance and enabling them to run in multiple computing environments.

CommonView captured the imagination of the Unix development community on both sides of the Atlantic, but most of the orders came from the US. Glockenspiel engaged a software publisher in New York to handle packaging and distribution.

Back home in Ireland the universities were producing more computer science graduates than ever before and many of them wanted careers with Unix systems and object technology. Glockenspiel looked like an ideal place to work and software engineers exchanged tales of John Carolan’s inscrutable recruitment policies. The company never employed more than 30 people at its premises in Lower Dominick Street, but those who were admitted to this team enjoyed a prestige that none of the large software corporations could bestow on its local workforce.

Bankers, investors, government agencies and the trade association that represented Irish software firms were less impressed by Glockenspiel. They struggled to comprehend its exotic technology and what its workforce of ‘class constructors’ actually did. They disliked the managing director’s unorthodox business methods and his openness with the employees.

They were as bemused by the cult of Carolan as those local youths who yelled out ‘Santa Claus’ when the hirsute head of Glockenspiel shambled down Dominick Street in his long grey woollen coat and sandals.

By 1992 the object technology specialist had grown its annual revenues to more than $3 million, but was experiencing cashflow problems. Its American distributor ran into trading difficulties. Its Irish bank wanted to rein in the overdraft. The Industrial Development Authority had never been convinced that Glockenspiel had staying power and showed little sympathy for its plight.

An examinership under High Court supervision offered breathing space. This process was a recent innovation – it had been introduced to Ireland in 1990 – that could facilitate a restructuring of the company with support from one or more of its industry partners in the US.

John Carolan (1946-2001)

Computer Associates knew exactly how to exploit situations like this. It constantly licensed and acquired software that other companies had created. CA wanted to neutralise Glockenspiel in order to thwart Microsoft, which had encouraged C++ developers to embrace its Windows operating system by employing CommonView. CA initially proposed, therefore, to make an investment that would enable the company to pay its debts and to formulate a development strategy more favourable to its new backer. But the circumstances changed when a newspaper article stated that Glockenspiel was in the hands of a receiver, not an examiner. This untrue report enabled CA to force through an alternative, and much less expensive, plan. It managed to buy Glockenspiel’s name and assets at a knockdown price.

John Carolan was the most important of these assets. The terms of the deal required him to join CA after the takeover, first in Ireland but later in the US where he worked on a new object database. The Santa Claus of Dominick Street returned to Dublin in 2000, but died unexpectedly in the following year.

Glockenspiel established a template for world-class software development in Ireland. By raising awareness of the country’s software capabilities it also opened doors for other exporters to the US. John Carolan’s name was often mentioned during their discussions there. By the turn of the century, companies like Iona Technologies, Aldiscon and Baltimore Technologies had refined his methodology of mastering an emerging technology, attracting the best available talent and partnering with global giants. Learning from Glockenspiel’s mistakes, these successors achieved international sales on a far higher scale than their role model.

John Carolan’s achievements were many, but Glockenspiel was the greatest. The company’s personality and genius were inextricably bound up with his own. It was no coincidence that ‘carillon’ is another term for a glockenspiel.

Everyone who attended Telecom 91 was struck by the extravagant displays in the exhibition area. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which ran the show once every four years in Geneva, had responded to an unprecedented demand for floorspace by allowing exhibitors to build floor-to-ceiling structures. The biggest spenders proceeded to construct spectacular multi-storey pavilions with sophisticated cooling systems and security guards who restricted access to the upper floors. The German national stand was said to have cost $34 million.

Ireland’s effort was a more modest affair. Bord Trachtála secured space at the global trade fair for about a dozen software firms and service providers to showcase their wares. One of these companies, Aldiscon, demonstrated a short message service (SMS). The Irish pavilion, in fact, was the only place at the exhibition where visitors could see SMS in action.

‘Our prototype was basically a message switch which interworked with radio paging networks,’ recalls Joe Cunningham, who was Aldiscon’s development manager at the time. ‘We had a massive fault tolerant computer in the middle of the stand. We had modems dialling out to the paging network. We managed to get some Swiss pagers that we could hand out to people and say “This is text messaging”.’

Aldiscon went to Telecom 91 to raise awareness that the next generation of mobile phone networks would introduce new messaging options for operators and their customers. In fact, the company explained, an industry standard for SMS already existed. Even among telecommunications professionals, however, this specification was still virtually unknown.

The ITU’s exhibition and symposia in October 1991 attracted more than 132,000 attendees. They went to Geneva to experience a new industry landscape for network services and network infrastructure. Traditional monopolies were being swept away and open standards were superseding proprietary technologies. From now on, for example, infrastructure suppliers such as Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia would need to ensure that their network products interoperated with those of other vendors.

Digital mobile communications dominated the deliberations at Telecom 91. The first licences for digital service providers had recently been awarded. Europe’s GSM standard promised an open and interoperable infrastructure as well as applications that the existing analogue networks could never deliver. As yet, however, no GSM networks had gone into service and there were no handsets available for them.

‘We had noticed some corners of the GSM standard which weren’t being looked at. SMS was one of those,’ Joe Cunningham explains, ‘The specification basically said “It would be nice for GSM to have a paging service and we’ll call it a short message service.” There was really nothing else at that stage.’

In March 1991 an Aldiscon team led by Joe Cunningham, Neilus O’Shea and Mehran Mirahmadi had set out to design a software product for SMS management. They tried to master every aspect of text messaging. They made submissions to the technical working groups that were fleshing out the SMS specification, insisting that no service should be dependent on a particular switch or home location register. Text messaging, they argued, should be rolled out across all mobile networks and across international boundaries.

By October they had developed a fully working product: the Telepath short message service centre (SMSC). To demonstrate it at the Telecom show, however, they needed to use the Swiss paging service as a substitute for a live GSM network.

Aldiscon positioned Telepath as an application that mobile carriers could insert into an existing network infrastructure, interoperating with systems from the big equipment vendors. Most of these corporations, however, wanted to sell all the pieces in the GSM jigsaw, including pieces for text messaging. Some subsequently competed against Aldiscon for SMS contracts. Others became Telepath resellers.

Following Telecom 91 the Telepath design team travelled the world to discuss the SMS concept with mobile carriers. At first these said that they would not do anything about text messaging until they had rolled out voice telephony on their new digital networks. Aldiscon did not land any orders for its SMSC until late 1992. The first commercial services began in the following year.

The main attraction of text messaging for network operators in the early 1990s was that they could use it to notify customers when they had received voice mail. Most service providers resisted the idea of allowing their subscribers to communicate directly with each other. That, they contended, would cannibalise their revenues. People might send texts instead of making phone calls.

When the operators eventually introduced person-to-person messaging, moreover, they often limited its reach. They might be willing to support texting among their own customers, but were opposed to forwarding messages to recipients on other networks.

Despite these hesitant beginnings, SMS took off because people wanted it. Texting proved especially popular among younger mobile phone users and appealed to the cost-conscious adopters of pre-paid services. In time, SMS generated huge revenue streams for the service providers.

Logica acquired Aldiscon in July 1997. By then 120 mobile carriers around the world had selected Telepath to manage their short message services.

There had been far more hype surrounding other communications technologies at Telecom 91, but text messaging was the one that became ubiquitous.

In June 1991 Telecom Eireann delivered a leased line to the O’Reilly Institute at Trinity College Dublin (TCD). The 19.2 Kbps connection was unusual because it was shared between the university and IEunet, a start-up company that rented office space on the campus. That line was also historic because it was the first to link Ireland into the internet.

IEunet was an internet service provider, selling access to the global network of networks on a commercial basis. The company’s offerings were initially confined to members of the Irish Unix Users Group. It supplied a Unix-flavoured form of e-mail and commentaries from Unix-oriented discussion groups. Soon, however, others discovered that IEunet’s electronic mail service was more affordable and easier to use than any of the other commercial messaging systems. It gradually attracted a small but enthusiastic cluster of converts onto the internet.

June 2016: IEunet team members meet again at the ‘Future of the Past’ event in Google. From left to right: David Broderick, Michael Nowlan, Gordon Rickerby, Nick Hilliard and Alan Judge (Photograph by Chris O’Brien)

The company was formally established in April 1991 by Michael Nowlan, who led a systems support team in the TCD Department of Computer Science, and Cormac Callanan, who was head of computing at the DIT College of Marketing and Design. The university held 15 per cent of IEunet’s shares, which entitled it to appoint one of the firm’s directors. TCD later nominated Professor John Byrne, a legendary figure in Irish computing, to occupy its seat on the board.

IEunet was one of the first companies to receive an official licence to run network services in Ireland, following close behind Telecom Eireann and global giants Cable & Wireless and AT&T.

The two founders held onto their day jobs while the company was getting off the ground. In the early days, indeed, everyone who contributed to running IEunet was a part-timer. As the workload increased Cormac and Michael were joined by Alan Judge, David Broderick and Darragh O’Grady. Gordon Rickerby became IEunet’s first full-time employee at the beginning of 1993. Jane Hinchy and Nick Hilliard were the next full-time recruits.

… And Michael re-reads his old e-mail (Photograph by Cormac Sheridan)

By the middle of 1994 Cormac was a full-time managing director. At around the same time IEunet expanded into Cork and the midwest, creating joint ventures with local partners to run internet access points in their regions.

The founders sold the company in May 1996. IEunet had changed its title to EUnet Ireland six months earlier and its new owners retained the EUnet name. Five years after that initial connection, Ireland’s first internet service provider had installed a 384 Kbps link to Amsterdam, employed 15 people and was providing internet access to more than 750 customer organisations.

Trinity College Dublin had never backed a campus company before. Individual academics, it was true, had previously established commercial ventures, including well-known information technology firms like Baltimore Technologies, Mentec and Softech. But Trinity as an institution had not participated in the formation of these businesses.

In 1991, however, the university introduced a formal process to support the creation of commercial companies and to share the proceeds from their patents and other intellectual property that they generated on campus. Iona Technologies was the first start-up under this new regime. Close behind it came internet service provider IEunet.

Eoin O’Neill, the university’s director of innovation services, designed the blueprint for campus companies. The new rules would enable them to access the university’s resources and allow their founders to draw an income from teaching for a transition period. O’Neill surveyed each of the university’s departments, identifying projects with commercial potential and researchers who might evolve into entrepreneurs.

The department of computer science was the most likely place on the campus to find emerging technologies with commercial potential. Its distributed systems group (DSG) was well versed in Unix-based infrastructure, distributed file systems and object-oriented software. It was also something of a veteran in the European Commission’s Esprit IT research programme. Thanks to the activities of the DSG, Trinity was then receiving more Esprit money than any other university in Europe.

The DSG was already more than ten years old in 1991. It coordinated the participation of fifteen computer science lecturers and postgraduate students in Esprit projects. One of the group’s members, Chris Horn, had previously worked inside the Commission in Brussels.

Esprit had always focused on the pre-competitive phase of information technology research and promoted vendor-independent technical standards. By the start of the 1990s the Commission was keen to encourage the commercialisation of the programme’s work on software methods and networked computing. Europe’s big IT vendors had other priorities, so smaller and more specialised firms were beginning to take up this challenge.

The university housed its campus companies in a section of the O’Reilly Institute behind a former shopfront on Westland Row. Iona’s first office was up on the second floor at the back of this building. After a few months the company moved to the ground floor and occupied the rooms behind the large windows on either side of the left hand door.

Iona Technologies was incorporated on 19 March 1991 and employed three software developers from the DSG as its initial staff. Trinity housed them in a barely-furnished room at the O’Reilly Institute on Westland Row. It was equipped with a telephone but no computers. It contained a desk but no chairs.

Under the university’s new rules for campus companies two of the company’s founders, Chris Horn and Sean Baker, could continue to teach students for up to three years. The third member of the Iona team, Annrai O’Toole, had been a full-time paid researcher in the DSG.

The new business shared its name with the Scottish island with an early Christian monastery. Later software firms in Ireland followed this precedent and borrowed other titles from minor islands. Few offshore locations were left unclaimed a decade later.

Iona’s management also took up the habit of capitalising the company name, although they never spelled out its letters when they spoke about the organisation.

The software start-up was well connected from its inception. The three founders were accustomed to networking with the distributed systems group’s research partners and knew their way around the European Commission. But the new firm’s expertise was in software methods without a proven market and technologies that institutional investors found uncomfortably futuristic.

Iona’s first revenues came from training courses, mostly in the C++ programming language, followed by roles in two European research projects. When it tried to formulate a business plan, it was increasingly drawn towards object-oriented software and to the potential for computer users to access objects across networks.

The mission of the Object Management Group (OMG) was to establish industry standards for this type of software. Founded in the wake of pointless competition among alternative implementations of the Unix operating system, the OMG wanted to prevent turf wars over the next generation of software tools. It had a strong following among the Esprit alumni in Europe and was also backed by most of the leading forces in the US industry.

Trinity’s distributed systems group was an early member of the OMG. Iona Technologies would become one of its leading lights.

The OMG’s drive to establish object-oriented software standards through consensus centred on the common object request broker architecture (Corba). In late 1991, following months of negotiation with rival corporations, the group announced version one of the Corba specification. The big computer makers accepted Corba insofar as it could complement their proprietary technologies. Iona decided to build an affordable and vendor-neutral implementation.

It launched its Orbix product – the first Corba toolkit for software developers who used the C++ language – at the Object World show in San Francisco in June 1993.

Iona Technologies was still a tiny operation with just eight employees and no marketing muscle. Orbix attracted the attention of a couple of American venture capital firms, but these were only willing to invest in Iona if it moved to the US.

SunSoft, the systems software arm of high-flying computer maker Sun Microsystems, bought a minority shareholding in Iona in the final weeks of 1993. This deal enabled the company to expand its development workforce, picking the cream of Dublin’s software talent, and to ramp up its sales activity. It became a pioneer in marketing its wares over the internet and distributing its code electronically. Iona was soon the biggest user of internet bandwidth in Ireland. Lucrative product and service contracts followed with corporations like Motorola and Boeing.

By 1997 Iona was running offices in ten cities across four continents and more than 300 sales and marketing partners were distributing its software integration tools. The company’s revenues peaked four years later at around $180 million. Progress Software Corporation acquired Iona Technologies in 2008.