The National Board of Science and Technology (NBST) was responsible, among other things, for implementing European Community programmes that supported collaborative R&D and regional development through science and technology. I joined the agency in 1985, shortly before the launch of the STAR Programme – a programme which, I think now, really was ahead of its time.
Before the NBST I had worked in Telecom Eireann, where I worked on network operations. This was primarily on the telex network, which was still a major component in the company’s non-voice services. But I also worked on data networking during the early stages of conversion from telex services to data services over emerging telecommunications networks.
Mel Healy was the manager of the NBST’s information technology group. He had recently returned to the organisation after a three year secondment to the National Enterprise Agency. As the chief executive there, he had overseen an early government effort to channel venture capital into new technology-based businesses. Back at the NBST, he discovered that the STAR (Special Telecommunications Actions for the Regions) programme could be used to assist the design, development and introduction of new technology-based information services.
This was one of the European Commission’s smaller programmes. STAR’s purpose was to introduce advanced telecommunications services into Europe’s less favoured regions. It was financed through the European regional development fund, through which the Commission tried to address regional development and to resolve urban-rural disparities. The NBST was given around £5 million to allocate in Ireland, subject to approval for a national proposal by the European Commission.
Following the Commission’s acceptance of Ireland’s proposal, Mel led the discussions in the NBST on how the STAR initiative should support information service development. I was a member of the programme implementation team, along with John Brady and Ross Cooper. Noelle Breen and Denis Toomey from the Institute for Industrial Research and Standards participated as well. Ronan Breslin joined the team later on.
There was a lot of passion in those discussions. A lot of new ideas were coming out. But we were really in uncharted territory. We knew that the standards bodies were developing OSI and we knew that the Commission and industry were pushing it. But the timescale was uncertain, the number of products on the market was limited and there were none at all available yet in some areas of the OSI model.
We wanted to come up with some kind of harmonised experience for users: an architecture for the supply and demand of information services. On the supply side we were aware that different public service organisations were developing their own services. We wanted to avoid a mishmash of incompatible systems. On the other side, we weren’t sure what kind of services there would be a demand for. And there were questions about peoples’ willingness to adopt new technologies.
I think that it was a passion of Mel’s to get people and organisations to adopt technologies early. For example, he had previously been active in an association of futurists. Their research activity and envisioning of possible futures influenced his views on the potential usage of online services.
These discussions led us to the concept of a ‘gateway’ where users would dial into a single access point that could connect them to a range of services. STAR would focus on creating two gateways: one for business information and another for tourist information. When these became available we would invite people around the country to take part in demonstrations and trials.
The big question was how to make the gateways happen. My recollection is that we originally envisaged ‘real portals’ for the business and tourism information services. But the gateways became more like conceptual approaches as the STAR programme unfolded. The NBST encouraged co-operation among the operational agencies and commercial enterprises that ran existing information services or were developing new ones. We also expected that the evolving standards would make these services compatible for end users.
Mel Healy’s goal was still to create a mass market for information services. He saw the Minitel system in France as a way to achieve this at low cost. Its technology was obviously not the most advanced, but the Minitel architecture was scalable and the dial-up service was easy to use. The French, however, had a top-down approach. Would that approach work in Ireland ? Mel believed that the French model could be adopted.
At the start of 1988 the NBST was superseded by a larger agency, Eolas. Mel left the organisation and formed Videotel Eireann, a consortium in which France Telecom would work with large Irish companies to establish a national Minitel infrastructure.
I didn’t follow Videotel too closely. After Eolas was formed I moved away from STAR and worked on telecommunications research programmes, particularly RACE and ACTS – the European Commission programmes that pioneered and tested broadband technologies. I was also the national contact point for the COSINE project in the Eureka programme. COSINE aimed to establish a common communications infrastructure for research and development throughout Europe. My role in that project made me aware of the competing approaches based on OSI and TCP/IP.
In or around 1988 I became involved in the VALUE programme, a separate European Commission programme that, among other things, tried to implement OSI in a research network.
VALUE subsequently did two things. We expanded HEAnet‘s international X.25 connectivity from 9600 bps to 64 Kbps in a single jump. We also looked at bridging IP and OSI through a series of gateways. Their purpose was to allow for interconnectivity between the IP world – which at the time was predominantly within the research community – and what was seen as the emerging OSI world. One gateway linked an X.400 message handling system with SMTP. Another supported an X.500 directory system. These were implemented in various universities, including UCD and TCD.
As for STAR, it was followed in 1991 by the Telematique programme. Ronan Breslin and Denis Toomey at Eolas managed Telematique in Ireland. Most of its activity involved incremental improvements to the services that STAR had helped to initiate.
What these programmes did was to develop a structured way of thinking about online services. In Ireland STAR created a mindset that was more open than previously seen in data communications and the development of online services.
Last edit: March 2016
© Tony McDonald 2016