Eóin Meehan

This testimony begins in the ‘Minicomputer systems and software 1969-82’ archive. Click here to view.

Videotex looked like teletext on a TV screen. In fact, it used the same mechanism for encoding the data, but whereas teletext was completely passive (there was a carousel of pages that you waited to come around when you keyed in a number), videotex was fully interactive.

Cognotec used videotex software called Mistel from BTMC in Antwerp. This delivered consolidated pages of foreign exchange rates from bank dealing rooms to our customers. We displayed this information on dedicated Sony terminals with a 9-inch colour screen, a small keyboard and a built-in V.23 modem running at 72/1200 bps. There were a bunch of videotex terminal manufacturers in those days, but the Sony product seemed to be the best – and it looked well sitting on an executive’s desk.

I still remember the banks of cream and brown P&T V.23 modems stacked in racks. There were huge by later standards – about 6cm by 30cm by 60cm. We had about 100 telephone lines and, when they were first installed, the P&T engineer insisted on installing individual jack plugs on the skirting boards in the computer room! As soon as they left, we rewired them to a standard punch down patch panel!

I also remember we had about 20 leased lines running into our computer room. These were essentially dedicated point to point telephone lines. Most of them ran through an old Strowger cross-bar electro-mechanical exchange in Crown Alley (when you dialled a number you could hear the “clicks”). At the time the exchange was so old that, if an engineer walked across the floor of the exchange, the floorboards would move, the wiring racks would flex, and the solder joints would crack, breaking the connection.

We also knew that if heavy rain was forecast, we could expect severe interference and degradation of our leased lines as the cables became waterlogged. The cables ran underground and were wrapped in canvas painted with pitch. Apparently, the solution was to blast compressed air down the conduits to force the water out!

We were the first organisation (I think) to deliver bank statements to corporate customers of Bank of Ireland daily. Our Mistel system connected to the Bank of Ireland’s IBM mainframe. We basically pretended we were an IBM 2780/3780 terminal and the bank would transmit a print file across a leased line to our premises. We worked with Alan Repko from Bootstrap who built us a box that looked to all intents and purposes to the IBM as if it was a remote job entry terminal. But it had an RS232 port and output asynchronous data. We could take that data, load it into the VAX 11/750 and then people could log in and read their bank statements. This was revolutionary for the time.

Using similar technology from Alan in Bootstrap, we were able to put in online enquiries for insurance brokers. A broker could log on to Mistel and enquire on an Irish Life policy. Alan provided us with another “magic” box that pretended it was a 3270 IBM terminal. Again with an RS232 output. Brokers could enter in a policy number and the VAX pretended it was a user logged onto the CICS system on Irish Life’s IBM mainframe.

We also put in a connection to the Official Airlines Guide (OAG) across Eirpac. This allowed users to find flights and create itineraries on the OAG system via Mistel.

Mistel was troublesome. It took a lot of care and feeding to keep it going. But it was also the precursor to the web and web applications. Videotex was originally designed to serve static pages of information, but Mistel allowed a “page” to be configured to start up, and then connect to a program that was running in the background, not directly connected to the user. Just like a web application server in later years. We were able to put in some fascinatingly advanced systems for the time.

Moving on from Cognotec, in 1988 I went to work on the EuroKom service, which UCD Computer Centre managed on behalf of the European Commission. EuroKom had its own separate identity and we were based in separate offices behind the computer centre. In later years our unit evolved into the EuroKom campus company, founded by the legendary Dennis Jennings and run by the equally legendary John Conroy.

EuroKom provided computer conferencing and electronic mail services for the applicants and participants in Esprit and other European Commission programmes. Users connected via X.25 to our VAX 8550 in UCD.

EuroKom was my introduction to the domain of networks that eventually merged into the modern Internet. At that time, there were a number of academic and research networks including BITNET and JANET. EARN was the European “wing” of BITNET. EuroKom was connected to all of them and the most popular application was electronic mail.

PMDF was a software package which allowed the exchange and appropriate conversion of pretty much ANY email from any system to any system. It acted as an email “switchboard” and supported many different protocols. It was popular in the academic world and usually sat on a VAX connected to an IBM mainframe on the BITNET network. We used PMDF to perform routing calculations on the domain part of the recipient address to decide where to send the message.

The idea of messaging interconnect was not popular in the commercial world, as most companies used a monolithic corporate messaging system such as Digital’s All-in-1, but it was a big thing in academic networking.

The European Commission, meanwhile, was pushing OSI and felt that the emerging internet standards were US-centric. At this point, the Internet was not fully open to commercial customers, and so the idea of OSI, especially over the international X.25 network, was attracting attention. It was fascinating learning about open systems interconnect, the X.400 stack and also Digital’s OSI session and transport layer software.

The RFC-822 style of address (user@subdomain.domain) was used on multiple networks. We were one of the first companies (with a partner company in the UK) to build a gateway that could exchange email to and from X.400 pretty transparently. This gateway allowed us to do two things: firstly convert/map RFC-822 addresses to/from X.400 addresses (to allow us to route), and secondly convert/translate the RFC-822 message format to/from the X.400 message format.

The inherent complexity and “design by committee” of X.400 and OSI eventually allowed Internet standards to proliferate and become the de-facto open systems interconnect.

Eóin pictured at a Digital Equipment Computer Users’ Society event in 1990.
(Photograph courtesy of Tom Wade)

Moving on from EuroKom, I went to Printech International – a company that was involved in printing computer documentation, and ultimately in software localization. Brian Stokes founded Printech and originally focused on printing confidential documents such as year-end reports. After printing confidential reports for Digital Equipment in Galway he got into the business of printing user manuals.

When I joined in 1989, Printech had most of the computer companies based in Ireland as customers, including Digital, Claris, Apple and Lotus. We had to be pretty advanced technically in how we dealt with them. The company used software called Keren, which was a printing production management system from a UK company. I knew the potential for online communications to our customers, especially as they were the leaders in the tech industry, and how it could bring us major competitive advantage.

So with Digital, we set up a sort of EDI using OSI over X.25. We were transferring files, using FTAM, with details of our inventory and the status of their stock. They had full visibility, and so could simply send us orders without having to ring a customer service rep. At one point this meant we were saving Digital two and three days a week because by Monday morning we would have a truck almost ready to go by 10:00am with everything they needed for the week based on forecasts over the weekend. Previously this truck would not leave before Tuesday evening at the earliest.

We also put in a connection to IBM Greenock. IBM were pushing strongly for us to do EDI connections with them with software supporting EDIFACT and connecting over X.25. We had our systems ready to go before they did, which made us look very good, and it meant IBM could then issue purchase orders directly to our systems.

At one point the board of directors called me in and said “We’re building a warehouse which will have stock arriving in 12 weeks time. And we want it fully computerised.” They told me it was going to be a high bay warehouse, with racks 30m tall in narrow bays. We were going to use high-tech, man-up forklifts. So when the forklift went into the aisle, it sensed a wire in the ground. This allowed the clearance on either side to be very small. The entire cab raised when the operator wanted to do some picking.

I thought you can’t have an operator 30 metres up who has to return back to the warehouse desk to ask a question on what he’s picking or about the stock. So I determined we needed fully radio enabled data transmission in the warehouse. This was 1989/1990 before Wi-Fi had been invented! But it was possible to use radio to send data, albeit low speed. We ended up having to get a licence from the Department of Communications just like a radio station.

We partnered with a company called Blackbird Data Systems in Limerick. We put radio data terminals on the forklifts and gave handheld scanners to all the operators. We built an entire management system that was based on the fact that the system knew where everything was. So it dovetailed very nicely with the Keren print system.

The finished product was simply dropped in a staging area. The warehouse operators scanned the barcode on the system, and it told them where to put the that particular palette. Because the system knew where everything was, we could also do rolling stock takes.

During my time at Printech I came across Jonathan Mills and Robert Booth in the Trinity Group. They became a supplier of Digital Equipment terminals, printers and similar tech. When I mentioned I was thinking of leaving Printech, they suggested I join them as their technical consultant, and help Trinity move into more technically advanced areas. We began selling full VAX systems and especially upgrading customers from existing VAXs to the newer 4000 series.

Around 1994 was an interesting time for online communications. The Internet had become formally commercialised, with Mike Nowlan and Cormac Callanan (both colleagues from DECUS Ireland) forming IEunet and selling direct and dial-up connections to the Internet. If you wanted a full, networked, connection, you had to install a dedicated leased line from Telecom Eireann. This was a significant extra cost. Corporations with no previous experience of the Internet were still needing convincing.

Jonathan recognised the key to this market was the application, not the technology. And that technology was electronic mail – being able to connect a corporation’s existing email system to the world of the Internet. But how? During a conversation I said – “Oh, I can do that with PMDF”. Now, PMDF was still a significant investment in software, and required much configuring. But in a serendipitous moment, Innosoft announced a “cut-down” or reduced version of PDMF that only provided one channel – a dial up connection to another PMDF system. It was meant for corporations to connect satellite offices to their central office. We persuaded Innosoft to let us sell this as part of a subscription email interconnect service. This meant we could install PMDF “Lite” on a customer platform, and it would regularly dial up our PMDF core system and exchange email. Literally overnight, a company could send and receive email with anyone on the Internet.

We also knew that a lot of corporations were looking at X.400 as the emerging standard for messaging exchange, but it was horrendously complicated to install and configure. Innosoft had developed PMDF-X400 as a channel for their software and by installing a connection to Eirtrade’s X.400 system we were now connected to both the Internet and X.400. So Team-400 was born.

An early success for Team-400 was when a small software company called The Solutions Group contacted us. They had been working with the Land Registry to create an electronic inquiry system. But the land Registry had selected X.400 as their email technology, and quickly realised it was not going to be a success. We were able to connect to their X.400 system and provide a gateway to Internet email.

Around this time, 1996, I joined Intel Ireland as senior VMS engineer with the new FAB14 facility in Leixlip and moved back to the corporate world. I was responsible for acquiring, installing and commissioning the VAX-based systems for the automation department that would run the entire manufacturing process, and consequently spent time in other Intel FABs in the US.

Last edit: April 2024

© Eóin Meehan 2024