Looking back, the striking thing about the pre-internet days was the control that the state was able to exercise over all aspects of communications and, in particular, the services that could be provided. The monopoly was protected whether it was in telecommunications, post or broadcasting. This was not unique to Ireland. Similar thinking ran across much of Europe. Nowadays it is hard to imagine a world without competitive telecoms and the internet. But back then we were only just beginning. When the internet came it did much to empower the customer, competition and innovation and to lessen the power of the state in these matters. That was much more important than the technology itself.
The Department of Posts and Telegraphs still held a monopoly over everything that could be legally defined as ‘telegraphy’ when I went to work there in the 1970s. In those years there were long waiting lists for telephone connections and long waiting times to repair line faults. The department and the IDA were forced to advise multinational companies that they should rely on telex for their international communications. A determined effort was made to keep the telex service functional as it cost less money and was easier to upgrade than the telephone service. Telex became a lifeline for business.
One of the few areas in which the department faced competition was in the supply of PABX systems to the private sector. When I joined the civil service as an administrative officer – I had a degree in economics from TCD – one of my tasks was to win those deals. I was also involved in the preparations to transfer the telecommunications service from the Department of Posts and Telegraphs to a new semi-state company, Telecom Eireann, on the first day of 1984. I was sure that I would soon be working for Telecom.
Around this time I became interested – just in a personal capacity – in MCI’s business in the US. I was always the type of person who wanted to challenge the status quo and that’s what MCI, a relatively new upstart, was doing. It found ways to compete with AT&T in long distance and international communications. People used to call it ‘a law firm with an antenna on the roof’. In September 1983 the company announced something called MCI Mail – an electronic mail service whose customers could ask MCI to deliver their electronic communications in whatever form the recipient was capable of receiving. That might be fully electronic or hard copy or a combination of both. As part of the service it set up regional centres to print out messages for physical delivery. These centres were equipped with laser printers at a time when most offices still used low quality dot matrix printers.
Towards the end of 1983 I had was talking to someone who was about to become one of the senior managers at An Post, the other state-owned company that was breaking away from the department. I told him about MCI’s new service.
I was at home on Christmas Eve in 1983 when the doorbell rang. The same An Post executive and Feargal Quinn, the first Chairman of An Post, had come to my house to ask me to join the new postal authority instead of Telecom Eireann. I was the youngest person at my grade in the department and this job meant a chance to challenge the status quo and a further promotion. I agreed to move.
An Post knew about my interest in electronic messaging. But the first thing they wanted me to do was to sell PABXs. This was the one telecommunications service that An Post was not prohibited from offering. We began to sell Ericsson systems. Our entry to the field caused consternation in Telecom and in government circles. An Post was forced to stop selling PABXs and our business plan collapsed. It was a major blow for me and for An Post. I told the Chief Executive, Gerry Harvey, that I would do whatever job he wanted me to do in An Post – as long as I could work on plans for electronic services in my spare time. Services like MCI Mail and its laser printing centres.
Accordingly, around 1985, we tried to strike a deal with General Electric. The corporation sold remote computing and international networking services through its General Electric Information Services Company, which already ran a local sales office in Ballsbridge. But the partnership did not take off.
Then we turned to the European Commission. At that time it was setting up the Star programme. I found a willingness in the senior levels there to support a postal company with a bit of spunk. Not only could the Commission provide money for new services, which was unbelievably important in the absence of venture capital and seed funding. It also had political clout.
I made an application on behalf of An Post for Star funding to develop a service based on the MCI Mail model. The Commission agreed to put up part of the money. The Department of Communications, as it had been renamed, was in a corner. It had to accept the project because we had European funding. Minister Albert Reynolds brought in a statutory instrument to allow An Post to run electronic services. In 1988 the company incorporated PostGem as its online services subsidiary.
At around the same time as the Star discussions, Guinness began talking to us. The brewery produced monthly statements for publicans and had to deliver these documents before it could collect their payments. Its invoicing procedure was labour-intensive and subject to delays. If the customers could receive their statements a day or two earlier, Guinness could improve its cashflow. We installed a VAX computer and started working on software to automate the document handling process. Then we got our first laser printer. Guinness would send us their invoice files in electronic form. We would format, print and then deliver them by regular post. This knocked a number of days off the old system and Guinness improved its cashflow.
We also started to work for flour producer Odlum, which had a different printing and delivery requirement. It wanted to send out recipes to customers around the country.
In 1988 we also made contact with Istel, which had recently broken away from the Rover Group in a management buyout. Istel had developed EDI technology – originally for the motor trade in Britain – and we discussed working together to provide EDI in Ireland. The first customer was Dunnes Stores, which agreed to run trials. Istel would manage the service. Dunnes could compel their suppliers to use the EDI service. This was key because there were so few people using electronic communications. One needed a market champion to compel others to join and incur the investment. Dunnes was exactly that market champion. This resulted in real commercial activity, even with a relatively small population of users.
David took to the Liffey to promote PostGem in 1989.
In summary, Dunnes Stores communicated in a fully electronic form over the EDI service with its suppliers transacting order forms, delivery notifications and, later, invoices. This was all about improving the accuracy of ordering and supporting just in time delivery. We were the first postal service to run EDI technologies.
Eirtrade, a division of Telecom Eireann, tried doing the same thing at around the same time. It formed a partnership with INS to run a service for Quinnsworth. A market for EDI was thus emerging in Ireland. But this market was in its early stages and seemed at times to be a bit like a family feud. Both sides felt they were protecting their patch.
PostGem was at a disadvantage because, unlike Eirtrade, we didn’t have our own network. So I went back to Ericsson and got them to build and maintain a small, but viable, national X.25 network for us to move data such as EDI. To get international connectivity we signed a value added network services agreement with Infonet in 1990. Infonet, I found, was very clued in on commercial issues. It was owned by eleven major telecoms companies, including MCI. PostGem was its only non-telecom distributor.
What we were trying to do all this time was to resolve commercial problems. For us everything was driven by customer needs. Our work was not really about person-to-person communications or free-flowing text. That market would have been too small at the time. The Guinness, Odlum and Dunnes Stores mail was always very structured. Structured mail formed the majority of hard copy letters at the time. And while we offered e-mail on the X.25 network, we never put much focus on it. Structured documentation was where the commercial action had to be in those days.
PostGem always placed a heavy focus on marketing and PR, especially after we moved into our own offices in Earlsfort Terrace. I also engaged people on contract who knew their way around the European Commission. One of these was Dr Jim Mountjoy, a former engineer in the Department of P&T who had become CEO of Baltimore Technologies.
People trusted the An Post brand when it came to delivering letters. But they were skeptical of our technical expertise. We depended on partners like Istel (which AT&T acquired in 1990), Ericsson and Infonet. PostGem did not even have its own full EDI operations centre until late 1992. And when I left the company in 1993 there were certainly more non-technical than technical people there. That was very unusual at the time.
We had Michael Kelly, Eoin Hester and Mark Carson from the An Post computer department. But most of the staff in PostGem came from outside the parent company. In general one of the ways we differentiated ourselves was by appointing Americans and Australians. We were also big on gender diversity. All this was ahead of its time. Brendan McMorrow, for example, was an American who answered our newspaper advert almost as soon as he stepped off the plane. He became our technical policy manager and later on he was the internet product manager at Esat.
We were totally agnostic about which underlying infrastructure technologies PostGem would use to provide its services – although, the more independent they were from monopoly telecoms, the better they were for us. One of the main issues I experienced in Europe was that engineers and civil servants who lived in a monopoly environment kept drawing up specifications and standards without really factoring in design or customer needs. This had the effect of protecting the telecommunications monopoly. The end products were over-engineered and were rarely compelling for customers.
PostGem, nonetheless, won contracts from the European Commission to develop software and applications based on OSI standards. As part of a consortium with Infonet we got involved in Tedis – a project to create a clearing house for European EDI providers. And we teamed up with Unipost for Cape, which set out to design an electronic tracking and quality management system for international mail. Unipost had been established by European post offices in the late 1980s to help them compete against American courier services. One of the most influential people at Unipost was Ross Hinds, who had worked at the Department of Posts and Telegraphs computer department. Gerry Harvey, who had left An Post, was in Unipost as well. With contacts like these PostGem wanted to become a service provider to Unipost.
I had always intended to leave PostGem at some stage because I wanted to live outside Ireland. But I had no definite plan until Chris Giles, who had been chief executive of Istel, recruited me into Unisource in Germany. Four years later, and a little frustrated with a limited capability for innovation in Europe, I moved to the US.
While I was at PostGem I was aware that MCI and Infonet were involved with the internet. In fact, Vint Cerf had been a leader at MCI Mail. But it was after leaving the company that I became fully familiar with emerging internet-based technologies. When the internet arrived, it was soon clear that things would change. We were freed from the standards and much of the unnecessary regulations imposed by the state, engineers and monopolies. The market won in the end. Now none would go back to those early days.
In 1997, when I joined Sterling Commerce in the US, all of its EDI services ran over the internet.
Last edit: September 2015
© David O’Meara 2015