It was a big event for Cork airport and the first time that I had seen ‘Aer Turas’ written on the side of an aircraft. The plane was operated by the cargo subsidiary of Aer Lingus and carried an ICT 1300 computer that was on its way from Düsseldorf to the Sunbeam Wolsey factory. I don’t know why the flight came from Düsseldorf. The 1300 might have been a second hand system or one that ICT had used for demonstrations there.
This special airlift took place in 1965. Five years earlier I had graduated from UCC and joined International Computers & Tabulators (ICT). I worked at the company’s offices in Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham, supporting unit record equipment on customer sites. Dublin man Peter Mullett, who later became ICT’s general manager in Ireland, was previously based in the Birmingham branch. So was Michael McMahon from Ennis, another member of the ICT Ireland staff.
In 1963, after a short spell in Dublin, the company transferred me to its office in Cork, not only to support the Sunbeam Wolsey system but also to install and look after its unit record equipment. ICT’s customers in the region included the Ford factory, a number of local councils, agricultural co-operatives, the sales and catering division at Shannon Free Airport Development Company and the EI electronics assembly facility in Shannon.
ICT also ran a bureau service in Cork based on tabulators and other unit record equipment. All of my work at the company up to 1965 involved this electro-mechanical technology. The products were expensive and the size of the market was very limited. That was why the bureau concept was popular.
The bureau not only provided services to its own customer base. It also supported the overall ICT sales drive. An example of this was the creation and proofing of the entire parts and accessories file at Ford, consisting of approximately 30,000 records, prior to the physical installation of its unit record system. This action enabled the system to go live much earlier than would otherwise have been the case.
The bureau was also used in cases where a unit record equipment customer could not easily handle peak loads, such as data capture for an annual or biannual stock-taking.
Unit record machines depended on punched cards for data input and output. I remember seeing huge stacks of cards sitting on tables in customer premises, especially during my time in England. The normal practice in production management, for example, was to record every order on a card with product details and a delivery date. These cards were then sorted and processed, prior to being placed in a stack that represented an outstanding order file. When the goods were delivered, people handpicked the relevant cards and moved them to another stack – the invoice processing file. Subsequently they would be transferred again into a stack for ledger file processing.
When computers such as the ICT 1300 began to replace unit record equipment, they continued to use punched cards as an input medium. Furthermore, software was also designed in a way that replicated the physical handling of the cards.
ICT tried to bridge the gap between tabulators and computers by selling a Univac product under licence in the mid-1960s. The Univac 1004 was a programmable punched card system with a massive plug-board panel and an online printer that could operate at 400 lines a minute. ICT sold quite a few 1004s in Ireland, including one to Hibernian Insurance.
In 1965 Sunbeam Wolsey – a textile manufacturer founded by the Dwyer family – became the first commercial organisation in Cork to install an electronic computer. Ford and Dunlop followed its lead in later years. Both of those companies upgraded from tabulators to an IBM System/360.
The Sunbeam Wolsey project was led by an accountant, Sean Kelly, and the company selected most of the staff for its new computer department from the existing workforce. It chose these individuals through an aptitude test and sent them away for training by ICT. The group included Eddie Moroney, who had previously been a knitting machine mechanic and later became the chief programmer at Bank of Ireland.
This group, pictured at the Imperial Hotel, Cork in June 1965, participated in one of ICT’s introductory courses to computing.
ICT was represented by Bertie Healy (12), Kevin O’Brien (14), Don Dennehy (15) and Tony Healy (16).
The trainees included four Irish Refining Co. staff: Ted Keane (2), John Collins (5), John O’Connell (7) and Liam Horgan (13).
Among the other participants were Sean Kelly from Sunbeam Wolsey (8), Frank Murphy from Irish Steel (9), Michael Hurley from Cork Marts (10) and Dick O’Shea from Verolme Cork Dockyard (11).
Photo source: Don Dennehy
The main applications at Sunbeam Wolsey were order processing and production control. In the fashion industry manufacturers usually took orders for a new product range six to nine months before it was released. They were then able to draw up a production schedule based on the advance orders. Sunbeam Wolsey wrote its first software for this purpose, using ICT’s assembler – Mnemonic Programming Language (MPL).
The ICT bureau in Cork also made use of the 1300, buying time on the system to run applications for customers during the night shift. This work included set-up procedures for new unit record equipment installations, such as the production of master record files containing details of a company’s customers or employees.
Verolme Cork Dockyard was a major customer of the bureau. The initial and principle application was its weekly labour analysis job. This involved the detailed allocation of labour hours – actual, overtime and premium hours – spent on the various cost headings of each shipbuilding project. This was a very important function in controlling the overall cost of each project. Other applications followed – for example, payroll and accounts payable and receivable.
We found that companies in the city wanted to educate their staff about computing trends. From 1964 onwards we therefore ran ‘computer appreciation’ courses at the School of Commerce and in local hotels. All the teachers were ICT personnel. There was a huge demand for places on these courses from firms like the Irish Refining Company and Verolme.
In 1968 Sunbeam Wolsey replaced the ICT 1300 with a 1901A which was disk-based. When the new system arrived the programmers had to switch from MPL to another assembler, Plan. Cobol was also used.
ICT, or ICL as it became in 1968, was the result of several mergers and many negotiations. It became very difficult for the company to support the wide variety of equipment that it had inherited. It also meant that people from former rivals kept appearing inside the organisation.
My colleagues at ICT Ireland included Gordon Clarke, who was always gracious and generous with his time and assisted with the applications in Sunbeam Wolsey. Darragh McArdle worked at the bureau service in Dublin and was later one of the founders of Independent Computer Bureau Services. A very capable man, he also became active in the citizens advice movement.
Hugo Patterson from Northern Ireland was a good public relations officer and helped to organise the lecture courses. I also remember Peter Cahill – a fellow Corkman – who came to ICT from Ferranti. That company had manufactured and sold scientific computers, but Peter was quite open to the challenges of the commercial world.
I left ICL in 1969 and joined AnCO, where I worked on a remote job entry project that connected the organisation over a dedicated leased line to the University Computer Company’s mainframe in London. I returned to ICL two years later, then left again to set up Computer Enterprises Ltd with Harry Dowling. We bought two second-hand ICL 1900s to run an independent bureau service in Cork and later installed two Norsk Data minicomputers. The company provided a payroll processing service for many years afterwards, as well as selling general accounting systems. I retired in 2000.
Last edit: November 2016
© Don Dennehy 2016