Robert Poynton joined IBM Ireland as a graduate and remained there until his retirement. His twin brother Denis was among his colleagues at the company.
He worked with successive generations of IBM mainframes and mid-range computers, holding a variety of software development, sales and management roles.
Robert died in March 2019.
When I left school in 1963 I decided to undertake the new Bachelor in Business Studies course in TCD. It embraced a wide curriculum of business related subjects, but I seem to remember that there were very few lectures on computing during the four years. I left Trinity with a BBS degree and a BA in philosophy and joined IBM Ireland. I was fortunate that IBM in Ireland was negotiating the implementation of an advanced real-time computer reservation system with Aer Lingus and hired several graduates in anticipation of the sale.
My twin brother Denis joined IBM as well at that time and was a systems engineer for most of his career. I started as a systems engineer too, but switched to sales after three years.
There were about 50 people in the company in 1967. It was an environment in which technical competence was valued and acknowledged so IBM made significant investments in training. It was my good fortune that I was assigned to the global IBM team on the Aer Lingus reservations project.
IBM had taken the Sabre reservations system from American Airlines and turned it into the Passenger Airline Reservation System (PARS). It had been thought that this ‘package’ could be used around the world without modification but it soon became apparent that it needed fundamental changes to be implemented outside the US. A number of European airlines – Alitalia, BOAC, Swissair, KLM and Aer Lingus – committed themselves to the proposed ‘International PARS’ (IPARS) version and IBM set up an international team of around 200 people at Heathrow Airport.
The team chosen to work with Aer Lingus included Kevin O’Brien and Declan O’Riordan, graduates of UCC with several years IT experience in the USA. Two senior US assignees, Ron Chaffee and Ron Schlitt brought their project management skills and airline knowledge and were joined by Philippe Baudry (France), Ron Weyda and Bruce Grime (UK). Dick Cahill led the Irish sales team and Joe Cunningham oversaw the local IBM technical team, which included Paul Kilcullen, John Holland and Stephen Ellis. We all received extensive training in White Plains, New York, the technical centre for IBM airline projects, and in the UK for System/360 expertise.
Joe Cunningham, who was my first technical manager, always encouraged other people to build up their own skills. One example of his technique was to respond to a question by giving you the precise location of a technical manual that would give you the answer. Tragically he died before the age of 40.
Much of my work focused on the user interface. IPARS used CRT screens. Model 2915 – an airline-specific version of the IBM 2260 – could display up to 1960 characters of text in green characters. The most important thing for the airline was to record seat availability. Aer Lingus had previously used a Bunker Ramo machine that did not hold any passenger names, but set counters to show how many seats had been sold on a particular flight.
I was thrown into real-time computing at the deep end and spent the next three years immersed in coding, testing and leading user training. My colleague Stephen Ellis assisted me in those early years. He provided an amazing technical competence to the project. He could print up a dump and find an error in minutes.
We worked in Assembler, which was just one step up from machine code. Every bit counted in those days and everything that used up extra memory had to be changed. For example, if a flight left at the same time every day, we could allocate seven bits to represent it. But if it only flew once a week, we would make changes to allow for more efficient file space.
Aer Lingus assigned more than 30 people to work on the new reservation system which they named ‘ASTRAL’. These included an American consultant, George Feinberg, and Tim Lane, an Aer Lingus employee who moved to AIB in later years. Tim had a broad understanding of all aspects of computing and was unflappable at his work. He was originally a systems programmer but also became really good at the detail of business applications.
The implementation programme lasted two years and Aer Lingus became the third of the five airlines that had chosen IPARS to go live – on time and within budget. ASTRAL began operations in April 1969, running on two IBM System/360 model 50s and accepting reservations from Aer Lingus offices and from other airlines. It was only in later years that travel agents were able to access the system.
Paddy Byrne and Denis Behan managed the project from the Aer Lingus perspective and my recollection is that they formed a very professional team which subsequently was able to market its expertise to other airlines. The airline set up a systems service division at the end of 1968 and began to provide bureau services with the spare capacity on its two mainframes. This operation expanded in the 1970s and, after it was renamed Cara Data Processing, became one of Ireland’s largest computing service companies.
Overall the investment in the IBM computers, software and technical support represented an investment of around £4 million – the biggest computing project that Ireland had seen up to that time. Its success undoubtedly contributed to the growing awareness of the possibilities of IT in industry.
Last edit: August 2017
© Robert Poynton 2017