IBM UK was hiring graduates here there and everywhere in 1960 and had a vacancy for someone to teach basic accounting principles to these recruits. I had been a Latin and Greek student in Galway, a teacher in Belfast and an accountant in England. IBM took me on, following the most thorough and professional recruitment process that I had experienced. I went to work in the education department at Wigmore Street in London.
The trainees were going to join the IBM ‘field force’ that dealt directly with customers and provided support. They were all smart people, but the only thing they had in common was that they had taken IBM’s computer aptitude test. The group came from all walks of life and included a pianist, a textile engineer and a geologist.
In 1960 the IBM 1401 was the Model T Ford of the computer business and the company had just sold around 40 of them in the UK at £1 million plus apiece. Invoicing and stock control were the major applications. In many cases the customers were migrating from unit record equipment to computers. Instead of knowing how to set up plugboards for punched cards, they had to learn how to write code for the first time. Many people found this difficult. But the computer trade was very profitable and IBM had plenty of money to spend on customer support.
The 1401 was wonderfully reliable compared with unit record equipment. It was also a huge leap forward from the computers that had preceded it. Systems such as the IBM 650 were very fragile because they were based on valves. The only one in Ireland was at the Electricity Supply Board (ESB).
After two years with the IBM education department I became a systems engineer. IBM trained us in machine language, but it soon introduced assemblers for specific computers – first the IBM 1401 Symbolic Programming System, then Autocoder.
I was now based at the company’s London Wall office, but spent much of my time on customer sites. I worked for insurance companies, for adhesive tape producer 3M and for Singer, the sewing machine maker, which in those days ran a chain of domestic appliance shops and a big hire purchase business.
At the end of 1964 I came back to Ireland as a salesman for IBM. This was very pressurised work, but you could make good money if you were successful. I also liked the higher level of customer contact and the greater degree of mobility in my new role. At the time that I returned, IBM had recently launched the System/360. It ramped up production very quickly and the new generation of computer technology was ready to sell.
IBM Ireland was a relatively small organisation at that time and we all fitted into 28 Fitzwilliam Place. This was a three storey office building with a miniature church attached – an oratory installed by the family that had built the house.
The company was headed by Ray Girault, who had been a member of the Free France movement during the Second World War. I think that he was taken aback by the high calibre of the systems engineers in IBM Ireland – a group that included John Moriarty, Paddy Doyle, Brendan Byrne, Tom McGovern, Joe Cunningham, Noel Peare, Declan O’Riordan, David Bateman and Donal O’Shea. None of them, of course, had any formal qualifications in computing – those qualifications did not exist yet – but they were recognised as leaders by their peers.
Most of these engineers had previously worked in the US and had come back to Ireland in the early 1960s, expecting to work for IBM on a major project at Aer Lingus. After that project fell through they worked for other customers and made a major contribution to the success of IBM Ireland.
Des MacMorrow became the company’s managing director in 1967. He had previously been the sales manager. Indeed, while I was working in London, he had suggested that I might move to Dublin. Des MacMorrow had a more relaxed management style than Ray Girault, but had to make some tough decisions. This was a time when the whole IBM corporation was concerned about the impact of anti-trust legislation and the management had to keep checking on activities that might breach those laws.
I sold one of the earliest computers in the civil service. In 1967 the Land Commission installed a System/360 model 20 with magnetic tapes – the smallest computer in the System/360 range – for managing the collection of annuities. These payments for agricultural land dated back to the Land Acts of the late nineteenth century and farmers were still making them in the 1960s.
Maurice O’Connell and Gerry Colgan at the Department of Finance oversaw the selection of the Land Commission’s system, along with the introduction of computers into other government offices. Gerry Colgan – who was also a part-time theatre critic for the Irish Times – was particularly influential as a civil service computing strategist.
Later on, in August 1970, I sold a relatively powerful System/370 to the Department of Finance. That investment enabled it to set up the Central Data Processing Service in Kilmainham, where it implemented applications for various branches of the public service.
I experienced my first computing disaster at the Land Commission. This happened on the day of the all-Ireland hurling final in September 1969, while the computer was unattended. An engine in the air conditioning unit overheated and melted the black plastic enclosure that provided noise insulation. The fan in this machine kept spinning as the plastic turned to liquid and sprayed it all around the computer room. The System/360 was a write-off. All of the essential data, however, survived. The Irish Dunlop factory in Cork had recently installed a model 20 that could read the records on the Land Commission’s tapes. Dunlop allowed the civil servants to use this computer at night until its own facility was operational again. Repairing the damage to the machine room fixtures took longer than acquiring a replacement for the computer.
The ESB required very high standards of computer performance in order to run a billing system for half a million customers. This report by Hubert to Alan Perkins, IBM’s head of customer engineering, offers insights into the hardware maintenance process. Forty hours of downtime was hardly normal, even in 1968, but that was what it took to meet customer expectations. Eamonn Halpin, who is named in the letter, ran the ESB’s machine room.
The ESB was one of IBM Ireland’s most important customers. It replaced its original IBM 650 with two 1401s in 1964 and installed a System/360 model 40 two years later. In the 1960s the organisation was effectively run by three people: a chairman who was seconded by the civil service, a chief accountant and a chief engineer. The accounts and engineering sides ran separate computing departments. Indeed, the computer industry in those years supplied different hardware products, using different programming languages, for commercial and technical customers.
The key people on the engineering systems were Bob Cuffe and Derek Carroll – both very brilliant and both with PhDs. They were able to produce extraordinary results with very limited processing power, using IBM computers to simulate future levels of energy demand and to plan the required generating capacity.
In 1969 the ESB system operation, which was responsible for power supply management as well as technical computing, acquired a new IBM 1130 as the replacement for an ageing IBM 1620. Once again I found myself dealing with a wrecked machine.
The new system had to be hoisted through an upstairs window at the company’s premises in Fitzwilliam Street. That method of delivery was standard practice for us. On this occasion, however, the computer toppled off the window ledge and landed on the street below. The 1130 was another write-off.
Other accounts where I sold IBM equipment included Cavan County Council, Glen Abbey, PJ Carroll and the Cadbury Ireland factory in Coolock, which installed an IBM System/360 model 20 in 1967. PJ Carroll and Cadbury both had a reputation for good customer relations. I found that every aspect of those companies was superbly managed.
IBM moved out of Fitzwilliam Place in 1969. The organisation had grown larger and it now had modern offices in Burlington Road. But sales was still the name of the game and we were still preoccupied with meeting quotas.
I left the company to join Allied Irish Banks (AIB) in 1972. AIB had previously recruited Finbar Donovan from Aer Lingus as its first head of computing. It had also struck a deal with the bank officials’ union to recruit up to 30 people from outside the organisation so that it could get a computer centre up and running. Finbar Donovan asked me to join him under this scheme and I stayed with AIB until the end of 1992.
The banks were not only late adopters of computing technology, but were slow to modernise their business practices in general. For example, when I had moved from London to Dublin in 1964 and wanted to open a bank account, I was told to go away and get some references. Only then could I apply to be a customer. A couple of years later, moreover, IBM Ireland changed its bank after encountering problems with a loan application. Some bank officials apparently did not understand what a computer company was.
AIB was created through a combination of Provincial Bank of Ireland, Royal Bank of Ireland and Munster & Leinster Bank. These banks had theoretically amalgamated in 1966, but they continued to operate independently until the start of the 1970s. By then the whole banking system in Ireland was struggling to process the increasing number of cheques that its customers were writing. AIB needed new technology and needed to employ it throughout the organisation.
IBM delivered two System/370 model 145s to the bank in 1973. The first applications to go live were share registration and payroll processing. These were followed by a much bigger system for cheque clearing and another for standing orders. We connected the first bank branch to the computer centre in 1975 and online systems followed in the mid-1980s.
Last edit: November 2016
© Hubert Kearns 2016
Hubert Kearns passed away on 26 December 2022