Brian Rothery

Two men came into the hut where I was sheltering on a climb of Mount Victoria in the Canadian Rockies. One was Hans Gmoser, an accomplished climber and mountain guide. The second was Herb Grosch, a distinguished computer scientist who had recently become IBM’s first space programme manager. He asked me where I worked, informed me that computing would soon transform my job and recommended that I request a transfer to my company’s punched card centre.

The year was 1958. I was 23 years old. And this encounter was my introduction to computers.

Just one year earlier I had left Ireland in the depth of a recession on a one-way ticket to Canada. I had arrived on a Saturday and found a job on Monday at Bell Telephone of Canada in Montreal. I had an accountancy degree from serving time in a Dublin accountancy practice and the College of Commerce in Rathmines. Bell hired me as a management trainee in its accounting department.

When I acted on Herb Grosch’s advice, my boss pointed out that Bell’s punched card centre was a backstreet operation. It ran IBM unit record equipment when I moved there and I started off by wiring mechanical control panels. But the first computers arrived shortly afterwards. Bell installed multiple systems and I became a computer programmer, working initially in machine code but soon progressing to Assembler and Cobol. Much of this work involved Bell’s records of cable and pole locations, which had required a massive clerical effort to manage manually.

By 1959 I was programming a Univac 3 and an IBM 1401, travelling between Montreal and New York on a regular basis. In 1960 I attended my first Honeywell 400 course.

Bell had taken me from being a penniless immigrant to being highly employable. On a visit to London I phoned the Honeywell office from Heathrow Airport and said that I was a programmer looking for work. The company wanted me to take a cab to its office straight away before anyone else recruited me.

Brian in 1970, pictured on the jacket of ‘The Crossing” – a story of Arctic exploration and the first of three fiction books that he has written. (Photographer unknown)

In 1963 I returned to Ireland as an IBM systems engineer and was assigned to Aer Lingus. I had been interviewed by an Aer Lingus manager in New York City in the previous year, when I had hoped for a job inside the airline. Instead, I found myself working on its systems as an IBM employee, first in O’Connell Street and later with my own office in the new computer building at Dublin Airport.

Aer Lingus had selected about 40 of its existing staff to be trained as programmers. These were bright people who had been transferred from clerical work. The group included the first female programmers that I had encountered. My job was to sit in with the Aer Lingus personnel and answer their technical questions. Other IBM people were better mathematicians than I and I arranged for a colleague in Germany to supply advice on issues that I could not handle on my own.

The airline was planning to introduce an IBM mainframe to process flight reservations, but changed its strategy after IBM launched the System/360 in 1964. It decided to install a Bunker Ramo Teleregister as an interim solution while it developed an online reservation system based on the new computing technology. The Bunker Ramo machine managed seat availability, but had to be supplemented by a pair of IBM 1440s for passenger records and accounts administration.

My three years at IBM spanned the airline’s punched card centre, its Bunker Ramo installation, the 1440s and programming for future System/360s. This was accomplished by years of travelling back and forth to IBM in London, where we tested programs on its machines during the night shift.

I was one of several IBM Ireland staff with computing experience in North America. The others included Aer Lingus account manager Paddy Doyle who, aged around 40, was older than the rest of us. So was Brendan Byrne, who became the communications specialist on the project. Dick Cahill, who had worked for Honeywell in Boston, arrived later as the salesman for the System/360s.

Noel Peare, on the other hand, had learned the ropes at IBM UK. He developed a reputation as a workaholic and, on one notable occasion, was transported to a customer site by ambulance.

Paddy Doyle lived in an abstract world. I remember him drawing an imaginary flowchart with his finger on a wall and discussing it with Joe Daly from Irish Life. Both could ‘see’ the technical details on the wall. This was very daunting for someone like me from an accounting background.

Brian’s career as a book author began with two on computing subjects.

I had started writing magazine articles while I was still in Canada and had pieces published on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1966 I wrote my first computer book, ‘Installing and Managing a Computer’, which was published in both the UK and US. Most IBM people would have written about these processes from a more technical perspective than I took. I focused on basic things like sweeping the floor instead of the algebra inside the central processor. The book drew on my experience at Bell Canada, where the programmers and systems analysts had been responsible for preparing new installations.

I made contact with Herb Grosch after the book came out. He subsequently paid a visit to Dublin, where his fondness for outrageous comments annoyed some of the more staid figures in the local computing profession.

That book, along with my experience as an IBM systems engineer, helped me to land what, at the time, was the top job in the industry – systems and programming manager in CIE. A lot of people applied for this position, which offered a huge salary. The managers who interviewed me asked what I regarded as the top priority in the post. I said security and backup. They smiled at each other and I knew instinctively that I had the job.

I left IBM in 1966 for the transport company, which had already placed an order for a System/360. Its preparation plan was similar to Aer Lingus. It would select most of its programmers from the clerical staff through an aptitude test. Once again, I would oversee their work, except that this time I was employed by the user organisation rather than IBM. We picked over 40 trainee programmers and started developing software at a rented office in Ballsbridge.

Several departments in the company recommended candidates for the aptitude test. But one referral from Heuston Station stood out from the rest. A manager there urged us not to take on an employee named Aidan McKenna, who had changed one of the processes in his office without permission. He not only became a CIE programmer. He went on to become managing director of Cara Data Processing and founder of Memory Computer.

Once again, my programmers at CIE had to travel to London to access a System/360 at the IBM premises there. One of the programmers moved into an apartment in London and took charge of organising accommodation for the others. The testing at IBM went on for more than a year until the first System/360 in Ireland arrived at CIE’s new data centre in late 1967. I remember the excitement surrounding this event and, in particular, the way that everything worked as it was supposed to.

We had used RPG to convert records from CIE’s punched card installation and developed three new applications for payroll, billing and stores management. We had chosen Cobol as the programming language against the advice of IBM, which was pushing NPL instead. Cobol seemed to be a more secure option.

CIE poached a few Aer Lingus employees for its new installation. In later years, however, one of the company’s biggest problems was retaining staff with IBM mainframe experience, especially when Bank of Ireland started looking for programmers.

In addition to my job at CIE, the ‘Installing and Managing a Computer’ book led to an invitation by Trinity College Dublin. The university asked me to develop and present an evening course in systems analysis with Alan Mullally from Irish Sugar Company. Later on I became outside examiner for the BSc in computer science in Ulster College. Here again I prioritised practical concerns over theoretical knowledge.

The methodology from the Trinity course provided the content for another book: ‘The Art of Systems Analysis’, which I co-authored with Alan Mullally and Brendan Byrne. Prentice Hall was the publisher. My first novel, ‘The Crossing’, came out at around the same time. In total, I have written 21 books. The most successful covered international standards for quality management, environmental management and outsourcing. I kept producing technical articles and newspaper columns as well and, from the mid-1960s onwards, I always had an income from writing.

My computing career ended when CIE appointed me as head of market development in 1969. This job involved launching new businesses for the company in areas like advertising and property management. In 1975 I joined the IIRS as its press officer.

The whole experience of working for IBM and CIE was very satisfying for me. So was walking into Trinity as a lecturer because of my publishing experience. I hadn’t even done the Leaving Cert !

Last edit: November 2017

© Brian Rothery 2017