Steve O’Hara-Smith

Steve O’Hara-Smith left his native England in 1994 to launch Internet Eireann and subsequently settled in Ireland. For most of his career he presented himself as a software developer who liked to take on problems that nobody knew how to solve. Yahoo! Europe, Dell Technologies and Rubrik were among the companies that employed his software engineering and architecture skills.

Steve died at his home in Kerry on 20 September 2024.

I started to learn programming as a fourth former using the computing services provided to local schools by the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology (CCAT). As well as using the teletype at school (two day turnaround) anyone could go to CCAT for an hour each weekday to use the card punches and run jobs on their IBM 1130 – later a DG Eclipse. I spent a lot of time in CCAT. Programming joined electronics as one of my hobbies.

In my year off and as a student at the University of Cambridge, I chalked up work experience as a developer, including TRS-80 software for Tandy Cambridge and working on the Newbury Labs NewBrain project. After my second year I realised I wasn’t the next Gauss and switched from mathematics to computer science to take advantage of my experience in an industry that was clearly growing fast. Soon I became a contract programmer.

From the mid-1980s onwards I worked almost exclusively with operating systems from the Unix family, usually networking them in one way or another. Nothing I did in the 1980s or early 1990s involved online services – data transfer between sites using modems and later TCP connections yes, online services no. I was aware of the UUCP network, but never got connected to it either at home or at work.

The first time I met TCP/IP was in early 1990. I had a contract with Picdar, a small mixed software and hardware house that made systems for the police. They implemented TCP over SCSI and used it for file sharing between Macs and a Unix system that had been built in-house. I always liked TCP/IP. It was much less trouble than any other networking protocol I had used and the only one that scaled properly.

My next contract was the Inland Revenue, where we used a TCP/IP network but the application code was all streams/TLI. After that I was involved in doing all sorts of things with SCO and a TCP/IP network at the BBC. By that time I was getting tired of the contract programming game. The internet looked like something that was worth getting into.

I was an earlyish customer of Demon, which started offering dial-up internet access in June 1992. I’d been aware of ISPs for a while by then, but prior to Demon the services in the UK were priced out of the reach of individuals. Some would accept personal customers, but all their services were based around leased lines with dial-in as a back-up. The price gap between Demon and the rest was huge.

I did some prototyping work on ISP setups at home before trying to establish a service, that’s when I settled on FreeBSD for the job. However it also soon became clear that the UK was not the place to do that. A little research revealed that the ISP business in Ireland had a Demon-style hole in it. This coupled with a long held, vague interest in Ireland prompted by my Irish ancestry (which may or may not be real but that’s another story) led me to look seriously into the possibility of bringing the Demon ISP model to Ireland. I contacted Demon to discuss the possibility of some kind of partnership or franchise arrangement, but we never settled on terms and so I decided to go it alone.

Internet Eireann opened in August 1994. I designed and built its systems using FreeBSD. I ran the company from day to day and trained a customer support team. I believe that our staff set the gold standard for support in the ISP business – we certainly tried to. We were happy to support any devices that were capable of making a SLIP or PPP dial-up connection and everyone knew the basics for Unix, DOS and Windows, Mac and Amiga. And if something unusual cropped up, nobody was afraid to say ‘I don’t know but I’ll find out’.

Each Internet Eireann customer had their own static IP address and domain name (within the internet-eireann.ie domain) with full SMTP mail delivery supporting as many addresses and subdomains as they cared to set up. The catch was that sendmail (and there really was nothing else then) did not handle SMTP delivery very well if the hosts were offline most of the time. I therefore developed an e-mail delivery system called drop-kick. This took messages for disconnected customers out of the sendmail queue (the drop) and re-injected them when the customer connected (the kick).

The billing software was also produced entirely in-house, as was the mechanism that handled routing – there’s a little hidden magic involved when a static IP moves from one dial-in gateway to another.

SM Communications, an international voice call reseller, provided our first international circuit – a 24 Kbps feed to Canadian companies Fonorola and I* Internet, which owned an internet access point in Ottawa. We met SM when we were looking for an office. They were already based in the building in Lower Gardiner Street where we rented space.

When Internet Eireann started, the existing service providers were IEunet, whose dial-up service was very expensive, and Ireland On-Line (IOL) – a shell service using IEunet as a provider. We had our own international line. We were the only full TCP dial up service that gave a static IP address and a domain. And we offered the simplest of all billing models: a flat charge of £10 per month with no limits on connection time, service usage or data download volumes.

That idea came from Demon. It was a great success for them and it was certainly popular with our customers. The flat fee also had the least room for errors or disputes. There was one company – I won’t identify them – which took our terms very seriously. They would dial in at 9am and stay online all day. I explained to them that they were quite welcome to do this, but could save money by taking a leased line connection. The customer replied that a leased line connection would have to come out of his department budget and he wouldn’t get it authorised. But the phone bill was a central overhead and nobody cared how much he ran it up. They did get a leased line a few months later.

Not long after we started Ireland On-Line switched to a similar model using an independent feed.

Dermot McNally became my right hand man and a partner in Internet Eireann, but all the full-time people were key. They included Dave Walsh, Alex French, Tony Byrne and Donal Diamond. Some of the customers made important contributions too – like Johannes Eggers, who wrote an e-mail client for Windows with SMTP support and let us distribute it.

We soon outgrew the feed we got from SM Communications. Sprint offered a good deal for a 64 Kbps connection and we switched in May 1995. That was also when SM became impatient about the money we owed them. They immediately assumed that they were not getting it and sued us.

Truthfully, Internet Eireann was in financial difficulties from day one. The business was entirely financed by family money. I did look for other investors – without success. We were always seriously undercapitalised. Operating on income is no way to run a fast growing business with an accelerating growth. The same thing killed all the other small ISPs, although the lucky ones lived long enough to be worth buying.

The action that SM Communications took became an important factor in the demise of Internet Eireann. The lawsuit effectively ensured that they would not get their money back. We knew that if we lost the case Internet Eireann would have no credit anywhere and would no longer be able to trade. That is what happened in February 1996, when SM obtained a £16,000 judgement against the company in the Dublin Circuit Court.

We made the decision to cease trading on the day after the court judgement. But that was not the only reason why the company closed. Another factor was Indigo. I remember Colm Grealy at IOL phoning me up towards the end of 1995 to ask me what I thought about the new kid in town. Indigo made big noises about the £10 million it was investing in a state-of-the-art operations centre. When it opened for business, it announced an offer of free service for the first year. Fighting that would have taken very deep pockets. The days of the small ISP were drawing to a close.

Dermot McNally and I then went to visit Indigo and Ireland On-Line to offer them the remnants of Internet Eireann. In the end both companies offered free accounts for all our customers. Indigo also offered jobs to Dermot and me, but we declined. We also arranged for interviews with PostGem and Indigo for all our staff. Everyone got work quickly.

While we were visiting Ireland On-Line, the power was cut off at the Gardiner Street office. Returning we found a nail hammered into the door lock. We had to get a locksmith to open the door so that we could remove everything and allow those customers who had property there to remove it.

Taking a company into liquidation is surprisingly expensive. That came as a big shock. Had we been able to afford the first few quotes we received, we could have paid SM and everyone else up to date and given the staff a bonus with the change. Eventually we found someone who was willing to take their fee from the assets.

After the legalities and ritual public humiliation were over I went back to contract software development – first for Motorola in Munich and then for Elsevier Science in Amsterdam. Dermot came contracting in Munich with me. He had become a good friend and I can never thank him enough for his support in those days.

Internet Eireann was my one time in the spotlight. It was fun, frustrating, educational and I’m glad I did it. But I would never do anything like it again.

Last edit: March 2016

© Steve O’Hara-Smith 2016