The two big technical loves of my life have been the VMS/OpenVMS operating system and networking. Everything I have done has involved one or other – or preferably both.
When I was a systems programmer at the UCD Computer Centre in the 1980s, my principal responsibility was for its VMS systems. In addition, I was the chief network engineer for the university’s connection to HEAnet and the European X.400 networks and I served on RARE Working Group 1, dealing with message handling systems.
In 1987 I designed a remodelling of the HEAnet e-mail infrastructure. Up to then its addresses had been based on the Janet ‘Grey Book’ protocols from the UK. Grey Book employed a ‘reverse’ structure, so that addresses took the form fred@uk.ac.oxford.vax1 rather than fred@vax1.oxford.ac.uk. The model I came up with was based instead on the RFC-822 standard for ARPA internet text messages, using the PMDF mailer on VMS. This ran over the HEA’s X.25 network and provided gateways into other networks such as EARN.
This was all before the widespread adoption of TCP/IP. So was a messaging service launched in 1988 by Decus, Digital Equipment Corporation’s user association. At part of its mission to improve the usage of Digital’s technology, Decus provided its members with facilities for e-mail communication. The Decus Ireland network (Dinet) was set up by myself and Joan Murphy of Bord Fáilte (who later went to Digital). Users could access the service through the standard mail facility on their VMS hosts. Innosoft supplied copies of its PMDF software, which utilised server-to-server telephone dial-ups to provide the actual connectivity. Dennis Jennings of UCD agreed to host the ‘hub’ mailer into which the sites connected, and to provide onward gateway functions. This was at a time when UCD wished to position itself as the centre of e-mail and networking in Ireland – as did TCD.
Some Decus members were very cautious about the introduction of external links, even though these were only going to be used for e-mail and there were no attachments to messages in those days. About a dozen organisations joined Dinet and got electronic mail connectivity for the cost of the phone lines.
Tom Wade at a Decus event in 1990
My first encounter with TCP/IP came when we were setting up a pilot campus network that linked the UCD computer centre and two of the academic schools – physics and computer science. I deployed a fairly clunky freeware product from Carnegie Mellon University on the computer science department’s VAX 11/750. This was quickly replaced by the more stable TGV product. Native support for TCP/IP in VMS was initially very limited, as Digital Equipment had wrongly thought that OSI was the future. They built OSI into their new generation DECnet network protocol.
The European Commission was also a keen promoter of OSI. It was always a rather unwieldy set of protocols. X.400, in particular, was like the proverbial camel – a horse designed by a committee. The irony was that the UK, Germany and France were the main protagonists pushing X.400 at the European level, but only Germany was actively using it. The UK had their own Coloured Book software, and France had a significant TCP/IP base. We in Ireland sidestepped OSI by using RFC-822 on X.25 and then SMTP over TCP/IP.
In 1990 I joined EuroKom as technical director. The company was based on the UCD campus and I had already done a lot of work on its behalf, supporting the migration of its information exchange from a DEC mainframe to a VAX. EuroKom managing director John Conroy offered me a higher salary and I moved. My new job was mainly to do with X.25 connections into Eirpac, Sprint and Infonet.
EuroKom’s EuroContact service provided prospective researchers with a way to find partners for proposing projects in Esprit and other European Commission programmes. A Stockholm-based company, KOMunity Software, had originally developed the conferencing system that powered EuroContact. Because Sweden had not yet joined the European Community, the service had to be hosted elsewhere and UCD had run it since 1983. Anders Rolff, the lead developer in KOMunity, came to work with us. The Commission contributed to the costs of EuroContact and EuroKom billed users at a commercial rate. That involved the production and posting out of large batches of bills.
EuroKom failed to take account of the internet’s impact on EuroContact. Our service involved logging into a central server, whereas distributed collaboration quickly became the norm as the internet spread. We saw our revenue evaporate very quickly. One opportunity that we did spot, however, was to provide EuroContact customers with access to internet discussion groups. We added this option to the user menu and made the connections through IEunet. It accounted for a large proportion of the ISP’s traffic in its early years.
The internet also became one of the connectivity methods for Animo, a messaging platform that made EuroKom a very profitable company in the 1990s. The requirement for Animo arose when the Single European Market was established in 1992 and border checkpoints came down. The new service recorded animal shipments between countries in the European Union. The Animo server in Dublin tracked every animal movement. It forwarded notifications to the veterinary unit nearest to the destination, to ministries in the originating and receiving member states and to the European Commission.
EuroKom competed against IBM to win the contract to implement and manage a central server for Animo. The Commission had a very tight schedule for the project and we were the only bidder that was able to commit to implementation within three months. We had the central system ready in less than two months. This was because we already had the server and communication infrastructure – a VMS cluster with X. 25, TCP/IP and modem connections.
I wrote all the code on the VMS server, including a communications protocol for Animo. Initially the Commission intended to produce the corresponding PC software internally, but John Conroy convinced them that it would be necessary to outsource this work to have it done reliably in time. The PC application presented the user interface and imported/exported the Animo reports, which were text files containing comma-separated dBase records. Peter McCarthy in EuroKom wrote a communications module for the PC that exchanged these reports with the server, using the protocol had I devised.
Some countries were keen on the Animo project. Others just did not like it. John toured around the member states to win acceptance for the service. When he got something into his head, he would go at it like a bull. John, who had a background in one of the large accounting firms, could be very dynamic and strong-willed, sometimes in a belligerent way.
We soon found that the national veterinary agencies had different requirements and operated in different ways. So we came up with a different mechanism for dealing with each of them. That suited EuroKom, because it would make it harder for the Commission to transfer the management of Animo to anyone else. The original contract ran for three years. It was extended each year until 1999. The Commission assumed direct control over the system after that.
Because of what had happened to EuroContact, we were aware during the Animo years that we should never become too reliant on one product. As we had e-mail expertise, and as I had done work in the Decus Ireland network, we started to position ourselves as a ‘business class’ e-mail service provider. The differentiator was that we could provide virus scanning as part of the service – something that none of the ISPs in Ireland was doing in the mid-1990s. John Conroy referred to our service as ‘Internet from people in suits’.
Sophos supplied anti-virus software that ran on OpenVMS. One of its benefits was that customers were told when it had removed a virus from an incoming message. We subsequently added firewall protection to the service, first with Symantec products and later on with Juniper Networks’ Secure Services Gateway.
Most customers for the managed messaging service were inside Ireland, but we also sold it to British Aerospace, which had a policy that all external e-mail had to be X.400 and therefore needed someone to provide a gateway to SMTP, and to the International Herald Tribune. The e-mail address on the newspaper’s masthead for a time was <iht@eurokom.ie>. The pioneering IT’s Monday online news service also used EuroKom for e-mail distribution. Our biggest e-mail contract was with the Local Government Computer Services Board, which had run into problems converting attachments across different mail systems. EuroKom also became a small-scale ISP, providing TCP/IP connections over leased lines and ISDN to around a dozen customers.
I am not sure what John Conroy’s ambitions for EuroKom were, but he definitely believed that it should be run as a business. As a UCD campus company, however, our board of management had a more academic character and he sometimes found it difficult to get approval for new ideas. This problem was eventually resolved through a management buyout, effected by John Conroy, Seamus Conlon and myself at the end of 1998. The buyout discussions coincided with a report which advised the UCD board that it should divest itself of campus companies. In 1999 EuroKom moved out of the university and into new premises in Stillorgan.
John Conroy died in December 2000 and Seamus Conlon took over as managing director. In 2002 we transferred our mail servers and infrastructure to a new facility on the Citywest Business Campus. Two years later we took over Zerflow, an IT security auditing specialist, and in 2007 we acquired Unit 4 Agresso Security Solutions Ireland. These transactions brought us into the security consulting business.
Managed e-mail was still seen as our main area of expertise. In March 2009 Topsec Technology acquired EuroKom, primarily to get the e-mail business.
Following the sale I concentrated on consulting work related to OpenVMS and TCP/IP networks. After about a year I was approached by a company called Interfusion which provided private managed WAN services to companies within Ireland. Like EuroKom, it was a small company with a high degree of technical expertise and it believed in doing a small number of things well. I joined Interfusion for four days a week, leaving the fifth day for other consulting work. Vodafone bought Interfusion in 2011 and I have remained there to date.
Last edit: February 2016
© Tom Wade 2016