Mike Rogers

It was at Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT), Kevin Street, in 1961 that I first met Dr Brendan Scaife – later Professor Scaife – who offered me a job at the electronics laboratory in Trinity College Dublin.

I was introduced to him by Eamonn Skelly at DIT when I was studying electronics and telecommunications for the City and Guild of London examinations. My memory of the laboratory at 21 Lincoln Place is a happy one with excellent working conditions and long holidays. My colleagues there included Gary Lyons and Joe Little.

As the senior electronics technician it was my responsibility to prepare the laboratory for student engineers. This work involved test equipment and electronic circuitry. The laboratory also built test equipment for research projects. I remember, for example, working on a model of Howth Harbour so that Dr Brian Carruth could study its silting problems under certain storm conditions.

The IBM 1620 computer in the electronics laboratory was used for teaching and research. Professor John Byrne was the main computer person and Vivian Killeen was the first operator.

I remember Vivian running programs for Professor Cornelius Lanczos, the renowned Hungarian mathematician and physicist, in the IBM 1620. Professor Lanczos was attached to the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies in the early 1960s.

I reported to Professor Scaife, who was responsible for the area in which I worked. Professor Percy McCormack was also very active in the laboratory at the time, lecturing and conducting research in space-related programmes.

Working at the Trinity College electronics laboratory in 1962.
(Photograph by Brendan Scaife. Source: School of Computer Science and Statistics, TCD)

When Vivian resigned, I introduced Rosemary Murphy to Professor Byrne and she became the IBM 1620 operator. Rosemary was the sister of a pal of mine at the time, Paddy Murphy. Eithne Dunne, who also worked at the computer laboratory, subsequently became my colleague at Cara Data Processing and did excellent work developing our software business.

After three and a half very happy years working for Professor Scaife I left Trinity in January 1965 to join Aer Lingus as a computer maintenance supervisor, looking after a Bunker-Ramo Teleregister (BRT) system at the airline’s new head office block in Dublin Airport. This system provided online reservation information to all the major booking offices in Ireland and the United Kingdom.

Pat McCarthy, chief engineer – ground communications at Aer Lingus recruited three of us in late 1964. Along with my new colleagues Tony O’Brien and Noel Headon, I started a 14-week training programme at Dublin Airport on 1st February 1965 in a classroom at the old Pier 2. Instructors from Bunker-Ramo came in from the United States on rotation to present different aspects of the course.

The BRT replaced an electro-mechanical reservations management system called Rentrix, which was located at the Aer Lingus premises in O’Connell Street. The move to the new head office in early 1965 was also the beginning of a major step up in the technology facilities at the airline. This was its first online availability system with connectivity to remote locations. There were six of us on the maintenance team, providing 24 hour cover seven days a week.

The central site at Dublin Airport used twin vacuum tube (valve) Bunker-Ramo processors with magnetic drum storage. Each processor had approximately 900 vacuum tubes. The drum memory could hold information about the Aer Lingus schedule for a number of months in advance.

The Bunker-Ramo Teleregister at Aer Lingus, examined by minister for transport and power Erskine Childers in or around 1965. Also facing the system are (l-r): Dr Michael Dargan, Finbar Donovan, Dr Patrick Lynch and Dr Jeremiah Dempsey (Aer Lingus managers or directors). The identities of the men beside the minister and behind the console are unknown, although the latter is believed to be one of Bunker-Ramo’s American support engineers.
(Photograph courtesy of Paddy Kilduff)

The maximum capacity per flight was 255 seats – a limit based on the allocation of binary code for each flight. This capacity was fine for the Aer Lingus fleet in 1965, when the aircraft in use included the Boeing 707, Vickers Viscount and the Fokker F27. Jet operations to continental Europe were also starting with the BAC-111, which flew via Manchester where Aer Lingus had pick-up rights to Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Düsseldorf and Frankfurt. The BAC-111 also flew direct from Dublin and Cork to Paris. But the 255 seat maximum would soon become inadequate with the arrival of the Boeing 747 – a ‘jumbo jet’ with up to 400 seats.

A central reservations group managed the BRT on a day-to-day basis, ensuring that all relevant information on display was correct. Sales agents used electro-mechanical terminals with a series of coded metal plates. These plates controlled coloured lights that displayed the availability of seats on a particular flight and date, which agents could sell to the customer.

The Bunker-Ramo system was very reliable, provided that there was no interruption to the power supply – a critical requirement for valve technology. Room temperature control was very important for the operation of the magnetic drum, where head clearance with the drum surface was critical for reliable reading and writing of data.

Aer Lingus ran an IBM 1440 computer in parallel with the Bunker-Ramo equipment, providing it with passenger name records on punched cards.

The Bunker-Ramo network linked the processors at the central site to sales offices in Dublin, Dun Laoghaire, Cork, Limerick, London, Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow. All communication from the remote locations was across leased telegraph circuits. The branch offices communicated with the central processors at 45.5 bits per second (bps) – a speed based on an American standard for telegraph traffic.

My job as a computer maintenance supervisor was to ensure that all the equipment at the central site was performing satisfactorily. This work was done in eight hour shifts from Monday to Friday and 12 hour shifts on Saturdays and Sundays. The rota assigned staff to remote station maintenance every sixth week. That meant being ready to travel at short notice. There were early morning flights out of Dublin to most cities with late return services in the evenings.

In the 1960s the Aer Lingus booking office in London was located in Regent Street. The airline also ran a telesales operation that started in Great Marlborough Street and moved to Poland Street when the business grew. Getting there involved taking a bus from Heathrow Airport to Hounslow West where the Piccadilly tube line terminated. It was a long day going out on an early flight, working on the equipment in those offices and returning to Dublin that evening.

When you were in your twenties, however, it was very exciting to travel to work by aeroplane – and very different from doing a nine-to-five job.

With the installation of two new IBM System/360 mainframes at Dublin Airport in 1968, followed by the introduction of the more advanced Astral reservations system, the airline’s data communications network became even more important. Network management was a totally separate function from running the Astral central site, which had a dedicated team of Aer Lingus systems and operations staff. IBM engineering staff provided full support for all the IBM equipment at the central site and in the remote locations.

The new network was driven by an IBM 3701 front end communications controller and its four-wire data links used multidrop polling. The modem at each remote location was connected to an IBM 2948 controller which, in turn, was connected to IBM 2915 visual display units over two cables. One was a multicore cable for the keyboard function. The other was a coaxial cable for the visual display.

The maximum distance allowed between a display and the controller was 2,000 feet. When Shannon Airport was cabled in the 1970s, it required connections close to that limit in order to link the operations in a new pier to an IBM controller in the old terminal building.

Aer Lingus used STC modems at 2400 bps in Ireland and the UK. In the US it started with IBM modems working at the same speed, but changed to Racal-Milgo modems in the early 1970s.

Managing the data network became very important for ensuring the reliability of the Astral system and its availability in the remote Aer Lingus offices and airports. The network control function was headed by Tony O’Brien, who worked on the Bank of Ireland network in later years.

Pat McCarthy spent a lot of his time building relationships with communications suppliers to ensure that they delivered a quality service. I remember attending meetings with him at British Telecom and Western Union. To see how well he was received was an important lesson in customer relations.

The reliability of the airline’s data links to the UK, including the Poland Street office in London, was certainly a worry in the early days of Astral. I remember systems manager David Kennedy and his deputy Paddy Byrne expressing his concern to me and my colleague Frank Blackburn about the reliability of the link from Poland Street to Dublin. Dr Michael Dargan was the CEO of Aer Lingus at the time and David was worried about his patience, and his long-term commitment to Astral, if the situation did not improve.

It did improve. Astral went on to become a wonderful system, giving Aer Lingus, its management and staff a global reputation in the airline systems business. Aer Lingus subsequently hosted reservations and departure control systems for other airlines around the world.

The availability of spare data processing time on the System/360s during off-peak periods led Aer Lingus to form a new subsidiary in 1968. Cara Data Processing Ltd provided computer bureau services to other companies and soon started to sell its data communications expertise as well.

I moved into Cara as a maintenance engineer and became a sales executive within a couple of years. Modems and multiplexors became my life for the next 25 years. Bull acquired Cara in 1996 and appointed me as managing director of the Bull Cara Group in the following year.

The training and experience I received at Trinity College and Aer Lingus in computer technology and data communications were to shape my career. On reflection, IBM set a very high standard for the computer industry in the 1960s. And Aer Lingus, although it was a relatively small airline, gained international respect for its technical innovation and expertise.

Last edit: April 2019

© Michael J Rogers 2017-19