David Little

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

It was Don Lehane, a colleague on the Caralink team, who introduced me to the potential of microcomputers. In 1978 he brought one into the office and showed it to Ted Murphy and me. We thought that it was a games machine, mainly because it lacked commercial software. My mind was still fixed on Caralink and the company was still wedded to the mainframe and minicomputer. Don, however, could already foresee how personal systems would provide an alternative to the online service that Cara was offering.

He left Cara in 1979 to set up Lendac, selling Cromemco and Atari microcomputers from the IDA Enterprise Centre, Pearse Street, sometimes with software for engineers. Later on Lendac opened a store in Dawson Street and targeted consumers, becoming one of the first computer suppliers with a high street presence. Don’s enthusiasm and insight had a big bearing on me.

Inside Cara, however, microcomputers had little or no credibility until IBM got involved with them. We had not really succeeded as a minicomputer supplier and we did not take on any of the personal systems that ran CP/M – even though we sold Digital Research’s programming tools to software developers. We became very aware, though, that microcomputers were taking off in the US and, when the opportunity presented itself in 1982, Cara managing director Michael Hayes and myself badgered IBM to be allowed sell its PC.

IBM selected the first three agencies in Ireland for the PC around six months before the product launch in January 1983. IBM’s thinking, I believe, was that Cara would focus on enterprise customers, Tomorrows World on consumers and Datapac, which was based in Wexford, on regional sales. Due to some administration error within IBM, the three of us received letters with the correct addresses but the wrong peoples’ names. Cara’s letter of appointment was addressed to Neville Kutner, who was the principal at Tomorrows World !

I had the task of setting up a new division: Cara Microsystems. Along with a colleague – Ciaran Redmond who later became CTO of aircraft leasing firm GPA – I went to the US to see how the PC trade there operated. We walked the streets of New York for a week, talking to PC dealers like Computerland and trying to figure out what made the system such a success in America. The variety of products and literature that we saw was amazing.

Cara’s PC showroom in 1984. Anton Tams is seated on the right.
(Photo source: Company brochure. Photographer unknown.)

IBM Ireland mandated that PC dealers should sell its product from retail premises – presumably because microcomputers were regards as advanced office machines like typewriters. Accordingly we did up the first floor of Cara’s new headquarters in Fenian Street as quite a smart retail outlet – very bright and with bold colours. We purchased about 20 units to start with and launched the PC there to an audience of 20-30 customers. One of the machines went down because a floppy disk did not work. Suddenly we realised that we did not have a spare one. IBM did not yet supply spare parts, just full machines.

I am not sure we ever made a sale on the ‘retail’ premises but the new business began to thrive. I remember selling my first IBM PC – a basic model with 16K RAM, twin floppy disk drives and a 80cps dot matrix printer – to a company in Ennis called Chemical Fabrics. It paid £5,000 for this hardware and also took out a £500 per annum maintenance contract.

After Cara took on the IBM PC, I myself became a microcomputer user for the first time. I remember that my machine had Pac-Man on it. And that the deputy chairman of Aer Lingus borrowed it over the Christmas break.

Cara’s vision was to become a major supplier of PC technology to industry. We set about this task by leveraging our existing customer base of bureau customers, setting up offices in Cork, Limerick and Galway and complementing our supply channel with a nationwide service division and a Cara training school. A whole new world of business challenges emerged – ones that we were not really prepared for. It took some time to get to grips with inventory control, implementation, delivery, warranty issues, maintenance, training and telephone support.

The Cara Microsystems team was a mixture of young heads at the technical level and older salespeople who knew how to deal with customers. Ciaran Redmond became chief technical officer, supported by Kevin Baker, Anton Tams and Andy Ennis. Joe Troy, Joan Bracken and Gerry McDonald worked on sales, supported by Sean Nevin in Cork and Connie Naughton in Limerick.

We populated the room in Fenian Street with systems from Digital, HP, Apple and Sord as well as IBM.

Digital launched three different personal computers – Rainbow, Decmate and Professional – that were not especially successful outside its customer base. By 1984 our products included the HP-150, which was the first touchscreen computer. Despite the minicomputer market shares enjoyed by Digital and HP at the time, their PC offerings failed to ignite the public imagination, due mainly to the lack of applications that would run on these machines.

We also took on Sord computers after the IDA approached us and asked us to consider the company, because it was planning to assemble products in Ireland. Sord wanted us to develop software for its machines and we discussed converting some of the code from our BTI system. But that never happened.

Cara flirted with the Apple brand for a year or two, but the lack of suitable commercial software, low market share at the time and the cost of supporting two diverse systems (PC and Apple) made the venture unsustainable. Apple technology flourished mainly in the CAD/CAM arena due its superior graphics and was therefore best left to the experts.

Even on the IBM PC, the software available in the early 1980s was very limited and untested. Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, Ashton-Tate‘s dBase and VisiCalc were the most widely used products. Terminal emulators also proved to be a big hit. Products from IRMA provided 3270 communication to IBM mainframes.

Cara was fully aware of rising competitiveness in the marketplace. The good margins that we achieved at the beginning of the personal computer trade were eroded very quickly. The number of IBM dealers exploded after the initial success of the PC. These soon included Business Automation, COPS and Smurfit Computing in Dublin, Irish Business Systems in Cork and Compupac in Sligo. There was little to differentiate one reseller from another apart from cost. We started holding monthly meetings and tried to agree on standard practices. But that effort only lasted for about one year.

Competition from other suppliers also increased. The key portion of the IBM PC hardware at that time was actually the BIOS software embedded in its read-only memory (ROM). Non-IBM replicas of the ROM-BIOS began to appear in 1984, opening the floodgates for imitators to design computers with identical functions to IBM’s. And for more start-up dealers to sell them.

The ‘PC clone’ vendors soon came knocking on Cara’s door, asking the company to partner with them. Every international company saw Ireland as an important territory to conquer, but many were unaware of the actual size of the market. A typical conversation went: ‘How many units can you sell ?’ ‘Maybe 300.’ ‘You mean 3,000, don’t you ?’

I met Joe McNally, the managing director of Compaq UK, by chance on a flight from London. He was travelling to meet Rod McGahon at Declan Computers and to promote the IBM-compatible Compaq Portable 1. I invited him into the Cara office on the next day, when he demonstrated the ruggedness of this machine by tipping it onto the floor a number of times. IBM did not yet offer a portable computer, so we agreed to sell the Compaq system into what we considered was a niche market.

Later on we endorsed the full range of Compaq PCs – due in no small part to a problem that arose at IBM. In September 1984 IBM launched its second generation PC and, based on advance publicity from the USA, its arrival was eagerly awaited in Ireland. The Personal Computer Advanced Technology (PC/AT) was built on an Intel 80286 processor and had a 16-bit bus in place of the original 8-bit bus. There was also a lot of software available for it. This system was a real game changer. IBM launched it with great fanfare in the Berkeley Court Hotel. Cara immediately placed an order for over 50 machines. I believe that the size of this order took IBM completely by surprise and it had great difficulty in delivering the PC/AT.

Under major pressure from our clients – and much to the annoyance of IBM – we decided to approach Compaq and to ask how soon it could supply the newly released Compaq Deskpro. This system used the older Intel 8086 processor, but it was faster and cheaper than the IBM PC/AT and had a better quality text display. Compaq was able to deliver the goods. It took some convincing to get our clients switched over to Compaq. I firmly believe, however, that this one order was instrumental in accelerating Compaq’s introduction to Ireland.

Regular visits every October to the Comdex exhibition in Las Vegas proved very fruitful for Cara. Very few companies from Ireland attended the show, which allowed us to understand the advances taking place in the PC. I encountered Novell at Comdex in 1984 and I met with its CEO, Ray Noorda, on subsequent visits to Provo, Utah. Cara launched Novell’s NetWare in Ireland in late 1985. NetWare evolved from a very simple concept – file sharing instead of the disk sharing that the majority of network software products offered. IBM soon adopted Novell’s approach, which helped us to promote NetWare product. The main competitive offerings in Ireland at that time were IBM’s Token Ring and NorthNet from North Star Computers.

After a few years Cara’s base of PC customers included AIB, BOI, Aer Lingus, MBNA, Guinness, AXA, Aviva, Irish Permanent, New Ireland, DCC, Cork County Council, Suttons, various health boards and government departments and many small businesses.

I remember a particularly funny incident when I attended the contract signing for a significant PC and network rollout at the Pepsi Cola offices in Cork. In attendance was the group CTO who suggested we should celebrate with a drink. To my surprise he opened the fridge and took out a soft drink made by Cantrell & Cochrane. C&C’s Club Orange, he stated, was the best on the market and Pepsi shipped dozens of crates of it back to HQ every month. This, he added, was a secret and nobody should know.

In 1986 Cara successfully won a Department of Industry and Commerce tender to supply a large file sharing network with 120 Compaq Deskpros and Novell NetWare. This significant contract would prove beyond doubt the capability of PC networking. Pilot testing followed, but disaster struck just before the contract was due to be signed. The then Minister of Industry and Commerce, Michael Noonan, was on a trade mission to the USA. At the last minute he was asked to change his schedule and go to Compaq HQ in Houston, Texas to discuss the potential for Compaq to open a European manufacturing facility in Limerick. No sooner had he arrived back in Ireland than the Financial Times announced that Compaq had chosen Erskine in Scotland instead. The minister put a hold on the order in his department, demanding that it examine the possibility of using Apple – which had an assembly operation in Cork – as an alternative supplier. It took a lot of effort by Michael Hayes and myself to win back the contract. We focused mainly on its technical aspects, but also argued that protecting jobs in an indigenous Irish company was just as valuable as those in a multinational.

Ashton-Tate appointed Cara as the main agent for its dBase IV database system in 1988. We were probably too ambitious when we hired the Savoy Cinema to spread the gospel, set up a sumptuous buffet lunch in the Gresham Hotel next door and sent out 450 invitations. Just 40 or 50 people turned up. Evidently we were far ahead of our time.

Looking back, it is fair to say that IBM transformed the world when it launched the personal computer. The early 1980s were some of the happiest of the 38 years I spent with Cara. We were riding a wave, doing a job that we loved and bringing back exciting new ideas from Comdex.

The company’s IT business subsequently survived four changes of ownership: a management buyout from Aer Lingus in 1994, an acquisition by Groupe Bull in 1996, another management buyout that I led in 2001 and a sale to BT Ireland in 2005.

BT finally laid the Cara brand to rest after 40 wonderful and happy years, stretching back to when I joined as the eleventh employee of Cara and ending with me as the eighth and last CEO of a great company.

Last edit: October 2018

© David Little 2018