David Laird

This testimony begins in the ‘Minicomputer systems and software 1969-82’ archive. Click here to view.

In 1981 IBM Ireland decided to appoint resellers for their golfball typewriters. The J. Donohoe group set up a new subsidiary, Datapac, and applied to be a typewriter dealer. As we already had a relationship with IBM as a customer, we reckoned that we would have a foot in the door when IBM appointed PC dealers in the near future. This proved to be the case. IBM appointed four typewriter dealers, including ourselves and Irish Business Systems in Cork.

Datapac went on to submit an application for a PC dealership. Dick Cahill and William Burgess at IBM vetted us and we became one of the first dealers in January 1983.

I remember going into IBM in Burlington Road to meet IBM Ireland managing director Mike Kos, having been briefed on how to deal with him. We bumped into John Cahill of IBM in the car park on the way out, and I remember him saying that the PC dealership was a licence to print money – while it didn’t prove to be quite that it was certainly a great business platform for us.

To qualify as an IBM PC dealer we had to have a retail premises. This was taken from the American model. Every new dealer set up such a facility, but in our case, it proved to be a white elephant. Nobody came to the retail outlet. Instead we went into businesses with demonstration PCs. I believe this was the case for the other IBM PC dealers too.

Datapac’s first employees were Michael O’Connor, Fergal Redmond, and Andrew Doyle. Bear in mind that initially we needed people to sell and maintain the IBM typewriters, which were mechanical and had a large number of moving parts. Both Michael and Fergal had worked in other parts of Donohoe’s and were trained by IBM in the maintenance of IBM typewriters, and subsequently retrained, again by IBM, in the skills of PC and printer maintenance. Andrew subsequently founded Wicklow-based Keysolve, which sold accounting and payroll applications from Exchequer Software.

When we began to develop the PC business we recruited graduates from the Regional Technical College in Waterford, the first of whom was Ann Roche, quickly followed by John Hickey who became our technical lead.

Our first customer for an IBM PC was Yates Industries Ireland, who were based in Little Island, Cork. Cathal O’Connor was the CEO, and he travelled to Enniscorthy to collect the PC. It was the original model with one 160k diskette drive, and I can remember a long discussion around whether to buy a second diskette drive, providing a total of 320k of storage.

IBM named Datapac as its Dealer of the Year in 1989. Pictured here at the awards ceremony are (l-r): IBM Ireland managing director Tony Furlong, minister of state at the Department of Industry and Commerce Séamus Brennan, David Laird and Dan Kickham from Datapac and IBM Ireland’s Pat Corcoran. Photograph by Frank Fennell.

The initial appointment of three IBM dealers effectively created a Dublin market for the two Dublin based dealers and the rest of the country for us in Datapac. We took advantage of this finding customers such as Pfizer, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Yates Industries in Cork, Waterford IT, Travenol in Castlebar and many other organisations throughout Ireland. A significant landmark was the winning of the IBM Dealer of the Year award in 1989. That gave us the springboard to open an office in Dublin, which we did in 1990. It was from this point that the business expanded rapidly, eventually reaching an annual turnover of 65 million euro.

In the early years IBM gave us annual targets for the number of PCs we were expected to sell. This figure was maybe 60 to begin with. Then, for the following year it might be increased by 50 per cent to 90. These were small volumes by later standards, but the figures always proved difficult to achieve.

There was very little software available in the early days of the PC. IBM made some third party applications available, but these didn’t fly. VisiCalc was the first real driver of sales and I can remember demonstrating the power of VisiCalc to the senior management team in Pfizer in Cork.

There were lots of challenges around compatibility between applications software and operating systems and between PCs and printers too. Sometimes these were related to differences between American and English keyboards. Around 50 per cent of the support calls we dealt with at that time related to problems with printing. This problem went on for years.

Initially customers bought small volumes of PCs – usually just one or two. They wanted to try out the potential advantages for their organisation, for a particular department or section within the organisation, or even for an individual – usually the accountant. Little was known about business PCs, and the applications for which they could be used. It was some time before there was wholesale uptake in most organisations. They were pioneering times.

Over the next couple of years IBM appointed more and more PC dealers, triggering a race to the bottom on pricing. This led to challenges in the business model in the 1980s because it hadn’t yet become acceptable in the market to charge for installation services.

In Ireland, Cara had an advantage over most of the PC dealers having been in the IT market for years, with well-established customer relationships with many organisations in Ireland. I always admired their business model, in particular their marketing expertise.

Having effectively created the market for business computers, IBM allowed Compaq to take it from them in a very short time. Compaq were lighter on their feet and introduced models with better specifications at cheaper prices and with a better supply chain. The market moved from IBM, and we moved with it.

In addition to the use of PCs for word processing and spreadsheets one of the early applications for PCs was accounting systems. It became comparatively inexpensive to implement a single user accounting system on a PC, usually replacing a manual system. We sold Pegasus accounting software, which was distributed in Ireland by Computer Resources, where we dealt with Charles Alken. We also sold payroll systems. We provided support to our customers for all the hardware and software we sold. I remember one problem we had in the mid-80s where a customer in Waterford had a problem that the gross pay column for their monthly payroll couldn’t cater for a five-figure amount.

IBM announced a new generation of its PC, the PC/AT, September 1984. One of our customers always referred to it as the P Cat. IBM launched this machine as a ‘multi-user’ computer. And maybe it was, but the problem we had was that the operating system, and the application programs that we provided to our market, were not multi-user. There were some exceptions to this, but they weren’t the market leaders.

North Star Computers also provided a ‘multi-user’ computer option. Again, this solution was inhibited in its usability by lack of multi-user software. North Star manufactured its computers in Cork in an operation run by Alec Wrafter. We dealt mostly with Tim McCarthy there.

I continued as managing director of Datapac until 2007, and since then have been involved with a number of small/medium size companies, mainly IT related, as owner, investor, or non-executive director.

Last edit: December 2022

© David Laird 2022