I was a late adopter of the internet. I don’t remember exactly when I signed up with an internet service provider or when I registered a domain name for my company. But there is a reason for that. I come from a different tradition. I sold X.25 networking services. I installed Minitel terminals and ISDN connections. I was an X.400 e-mail user. And I experienced data communications for the first time long before any of those technologies arrived.
It all started with a record keeping service for farmers.
In 1980 I went to work at the Irish Farm Centre as an accounts technician for the Irish Farm Accounts Company (IFAC). Not many farmers at that time were able to pay for the services of a accountant to produce financial statements for the Revenue. IFAC offered them a low-cost alternative. Employees like me would go out to the farms and gather basic information about income, expenditure and livestock numbers. We wrote down all the figures in pre-formatted books. Then the company prepared this data for processing at GC McKeown’s bureau service on Wellington Quay. The bureau, which ran a Digital Equipment PDP-11 system, churned out financial reports on a wide-format line printer.
This record keeping service was never network-based. We delivered data to the bureau on reels of tape. But we had a 300 baud modem for dial-up connections into McKeown’s and used it for making corrections to the processed farm reports. In those days there was no metering of telephone calls, so you could keep a computer online for a year for the price of one local call. Everyone used to do it.
Later on, the Farm Accounts Company installed its own computer – a VAX 11/730 – and I became a programmer. I attended night classes and eventually received a City & Guilds diploma. I joined GC McKeown as operations manager in 1984.
In 1985 I moved to ICS Computing Ireland to work on Link, a videotex service for the property trade. This was based on Prestel – a format that was similar to, but not compatible with, the other videotex formats of the 1980s. ICS Computing Ireland, the Dublin-based subsidiary of Northern Ireland’s biggest computing service company, had modified a property information system from the UK in order to create Link. The service was the only one of its kind in Ireland and we rolled it out to more than 40 estate agents. Link was a cost-effective way for them to distribute details of properties for sale. They paid only one quarter of what they would have to spend on an equivalent newspaper advertisement. But the service never achieved a critical mass.
Cara, which at that time was owned by Aer Lingus, took over the Dublin arm of ICS in 1986 and wound down Link. Cara employed me and got me to work on a variety of projects.
Members of the Timas network team in 1992 (l-r): Brendan Carney, Ciaran Henry, Paul Skehan, Niall Syms and Tom Coade.
(Photo source: Company brochure courtesy of Brian Dent. Photographer unknown.)
In 1987 I was seconded to the Travel Industry Multi Access System (Timas), which was located in the same Fenian Street building as Cara. Timas ran a data communications system for travel agencies. Like Link, this was an industry-specific online service, but one that had a much larger user base and was trading profitably. The company had five or six staff, led by general manager Dick Brennan. Aer Lingus, members of the Irish Travel Agents Association and Videcom, a specialist technology vendor, owned the consortium behind Timas.
Back in 1982 when it was launched, Timas had been the first travel trade system in the world that could display flight information from two separate airlines on the same screen. By the middle of 1987 the agencies that subscribed to Timas were able to access the reservations systems of fifteen airlines, three tour operators and two ferry companies. The service ran on Videcom equipment, which required users to invest in dedicated data lines and in special-purpose Apollo terminals. These could switch between ‘green screen’ displays for airline reservations and videotex displays for other information.
At that time there were around 400 travel agents in Ireland, including part-timers in small towns who offered odd combinations of services under the same roof. In 1987 Timas had links to more than 130 agent locations and wanted to attract more customers by making the system affordable. It therefore introduced dial-up access through the Eirpac X.25 network and make it possible for agents to use regular PCs instead of the Apollo terminals. These options halved the technology costs for users. The end result was that Timas expanded its base to 240 agents, including many of those part-timers. Some of those customers were very good at getting the most out of the reservations systems, especially when it came to squeezing commission fees out of the airlines.
Timas contracted Datalex to move its service from the original platform to a new one that Videcom had developed. This system, known as Epic, was not only a switch but also provided a protocol convertor so that users could view videotex displays for the tour operators and ferry companies as well as airline reservation screens. I was the link between the Datalex programmers and our programmers. Soon I transferred out of Cara and became the network manager at Timas.
As part of the upgrade to Epic, we also sourced new X.25 technology from Plessey-Telenet, giving me my first exposure to packet switching. On the Videcom equipment, we had to connect analogue leased lines into ports on an RCU device, using a separate jackplug for each agent. Compared with this, our new X.25 network seemed to be way ahead of its time. Private X.25 networks were extremely secure and reliable, especially when data connections all over Ireland still had to run over copper wires. If there was a problem with an X.25 connection I could use an HP data scope to see exactly where it was.
After we implemented X.25 for the travel agents, we looked around for new projects. We suggested to Bord Fáilte that Timas might build a second network for tourism within Ireland and put together the original proposal for the Gulliver service. But we were not involved in the development of Gulliver. Then we heard that Sprint was looking for a local partner to host some of its systems in Ireland. We were ideal for that job. We not only signed a facilities management contract, but also became a Sprint reseller.
Another company that came looking for an Irish partner was Euro Datacom. Based in Huddersfield, it sold managed network services in Britain in competition with BT. Timas started working with the company in 1992, offering low-cost X.25 connections across the Irish Sea. The first customer that we signed was Irish Express Cargo. We also sold fixed price data links into Britain to a number of financial institutions.
Timas was now diversifying, but the company was still firmly embedded in the travel trade. Aer Lingus had become its majority shareholder and the senior managers over me came from the airline. I decided to go out on my own. I left behind a large salary – along with a pension plan and free flights – and launched International Network Systems (INS) in May 1993. Data Electronics gave me a room to work from at its premises in Harolds Cross.
The partnerships that I had formed in Timas carried over into INS. My first contract was with Bord Fáilte, installing Minitel terminals in the UK so that tour operators there could access Gulliver. I found more Irish customers for Euro Datacom, which was soon acquired by Telecom Italia. INS also became a reseller for Sprint, concentrating on its Global SprintFax service – a store-and-forward system for cut-price fax broadcasts. The corporation’s value added services included SprintMail, which was based on X.400, and a short-lived TCP/IP over X.25 networking package.
INS got into hardware sales after a couple of years, mainly because customers kept asking if I could do more things for them. I knew a lot of people in the travel business and could help them with things that they found difficult to do. The company provided consulting and technical support and, in time, expanded into web hosting, voice-over-IP and internet security. But I always worked on the edges of the internet, not in the middle of it.
One thing that I have noticed is the life expectancy of information technologies has gradually got shorter. Some of the older communications equipment, however, has lasted a long time. There are systems still in use today that I installed for travel companies in the years before the internet.
Last edit: April 2019
© Tom Coade 2015-2019