Brian Dent participated in the evolution of online travel reservations from the earliest mainframe systems inside airlines to web sites that enabled individual travellers to plan their journeys.
One of the first programmers at Aer Lingus, where former colleagues remember his exceptionally neat code, he stayed at the airline until 1988. He then joined one of its offshoots, Timas, which operated a reservations network for Irish travel agents. From there he progressed through Galileo Ireland to Datalex and GoHop.ie.
In my leaving certificate year of 1966, like many young lads, I was struggling as to what career I wished to pursue. Many of my friends were opting for accountancy but to be honest I found this a bit dry. In the end I opted to do a business studies course in the College of Commence in Rathmines. By chance in the library I came across a book on computers and computing and I was hooked. The two big computer users at the time were the ESB and Aer Lingus and in October of 1966 I was offered a position in Aer Lingus.
Staff were not recruited directly into the programming section, so I initially started in the accounts payable section. The first opportunity to join the systems department came when Aer Lingus started recruiting for the Astral project. Unfortunately I was still on probation (first 6 months) so my application was disallowed. I managed to secure a job offer of computer operator in early 1968. While my goal was to go into programming, working as an operator gave me a better understanding of the machinery and it proved to be a benefit to me later when I did commence programming.
John O’Keeffe, who had also worked in accounts, moved into the systems department the same day as myself. Liam Cassidy, the operations manager, showed us the two IBM System/360s that the airline had recently installed in its head office to run the IPARS reservation system. One of the two System/360s was slightly more powerful than the other and, when the reservations system went live, this was treated as the primary machine. The second would provide back-up for Astral as well as running applications for accounts, payroll and technical stores. Then, almost immediately, Liam told us that we would be going to London for a training course with IBM the following week. This was supposed to be a short trip, but we stayed for three months.
Brian pictured at the System/360 operator’s console in 1969.
(Source: Company brochure courtesy of Nora O’Rourke)
IBM had set up an IPARS implementation unit in Boadicea House at Heathrow Airport. The software was derived from a system that American Airlines had originally developed for use in the United States. Five European airlines were preparing to introduce it and they had much more complicated scheduling and interconnection requirements than their US counterparts. The IBM group was addressing those needs with the international version of the software. It was also training IBM computer operators to migrate to the System/360 and was expecting Aer Lingus to send over people with experience on the IBM 1440. It was surprised when two raw computer novices showed up. We spent our first two weeks in Boadicea House locked in a room with an IBM instructor who explained the architecture of the System/360, the instruction set, binary and hexadecimal formats, JCL and how to read a memory dump.
Back in Dublin the new computer operations team was taking shape under Liam Cassidy and Liam Grimes. The airline hired Pat Cormican and John Cronin, who were Irish but had acquired 360 operations experience in the US, and Malcolm Banks from the UK.
The company’s programmers and system analysts, led by project manager Denis Behan and Brian Ennis, were based on the fourth floor of the head office building. Among many people involved names such as Pat Noone, Paddy Rock, Pat O’Brien, Harry Sheridan, Pat Kenny, Kevin Kelly, Michael O’Duffy and John McEneaney come to mind. All the hardware engineers on site were IBM employees, but Aer Lingus had its own team of communications technicians, including Mick Rogers, who looked after the terminal network. Reservations specialists also worked on the introduction of IPARS, preparing airline schedules for loading into Astral and testing the integrity of the applications software.
There was an in-house competition to name the Aer Lingus version of IPARS. Some people felt Realt was a better name but the top boss, the head of systems David Kennedy, chose Astral.
I moved from operations to Astral programming in 1971. The Astral programmers were regarded as the top stream in Aer Lingus, compared with those who were responsible for the MVS operating system. We were the glory boys who worked in real-time computing but the MVS guys were more commercially in demand, as there was only one ACP system in Ireland.
One of the first enhancements made to the Astral system was the introduction of a ticketing function, which allowed tickets to be produced on a specialised Texas Instruments printer rather than hand written as previously. The IPARS airlines co-operated on developments and often exchanged software and supplied personnel to form development teams on major projects. For example, I spent a year in Amsterdam in 1973/74, working with people from British Airways, KLM, South African Airways and Swissair on a departure control application to provide check-in and weight and balance functionality.
The communications platform of Astral was initially based on dedicated communications links to the outlying Aer Lingus offices in Ireland, the UK, North America and continental Europe. These links were expensive to lease from the telecom companies and when SITA launched its airline terminal network we quickly moved many of the airline offices to this service. I was in the Paris office to oversee the first continental switch to SITA. SITA charged by the number of characters sent and received over their links and I was tasked with developing software that would compress the message size by eliminating spaces from the transmitted message and then reinserting the spaces prior to display to the end user.
In the late 1970s Aer Lingus began offering a hosting service to other airlines, to make use of spare capacity on the Astral system. Liam Grimes headed up its airlines marketing group. Although a small carrier by international standards Aer Lingus was particularly strong in selling its reservations and departure control system. Airlines hosted included Egypt Air, Kuwait Airways, Air Malta, Cyprus Airways, Bangkok Airways and Air Zimbabwe.
Some of these carriers went on to set up reservations systems of their own and in 1984 I was part of the Aer Lingus team that developed and installed the Kuwait Airways system. While living in Kuwait City one of our team, Pat Ratcliffe, brought home an IBM PC and there was great speculation as to what use it could be put apart from amusing ourselves with games! This Kuwait Airways system operated until the Iraq invasion in August 1990 when Iraqi solders loaded it into trucks and shipped it back to Baghdad, expecting to be able to plug it in and that all would operate for them.
The end of the 1980s saw the development of two major GDS services in Europe: Galileo and Amadeus. Aer Lingus opted to join the Galileo GDS and I worked in Amsterdam during 1987 and early 1988 with the initial setup of Galileo before it moved to a permanent base in Swindon, UK. I was seconded to Timas at the end of 1988 as part of the senior management team tasked with the redevelopment of Timas to support the Galileo rollout in Ireland.
Last edit: April 2019
© Brian Dent 2019