My family ran a shipping and freight forwarding company and I was only nine years old when I started to do things there. I always had an acumen for business. But I was never academic. At school I went in for the extracurricular activities. St Paul’s Raheny offered Fortran programming classes and, not having its own computer, would send our code for processing by Digital Equipment in Galway. In 1979, three years after I left school, that experience led me to apply for a job that I was totally unqualified for.
The National Manpower Service was looking for a data processing manager. I had come to the end of a fixed term contract in the accounts department at General Foods, which ran a production facility in Clondalkin for its Pop Rocks exploding candy. I was interested in changing to computer work and put together the best CV that I could and managed to get an interview at Manpower. When I got there, I admitted that what I really wanted was to find out how to make myself eligible for that sort of job at some time in the future. The interviewer suggested that I try to get on one of AnCO‘s technology training courses and he arranged for me to sit the relevant tests.
I reported to AnCO which sent me for an aptitude test. I scored well on it because I had taken the same test in the previous two weeks. My eldest brother Steve, who was a teacher, had arranged this with a very progressive career guidance nun. That got me into a course at Express Computer Training, a company led by Mike Goodliffe that also wrote the payroll system for Dunnes Stores. There were 20 of us on that nine-month course, including Joe Brennan, who went on to a career in software sales, and Tony Campbell who joined the computer department at Irish Sugar. Three of the others worked together in Rowntree Mackintosh after the course. We learned Cobol, Basic, RPG II and JCL on an ICL 2904 computer.
Work Stations hired me just under a year after I finished the course. I would be the financial controller there because of my accounting background. I reported for work its premises in 17 Nottingham Street, Dublin on 14th February 1981. The company sent me home for the day, however, because my office wasn’t ready yet. Every year since 1981 I have marked that anniversary by taking the day off.
John Bergin and Jerry Sheehan had set up Work Stations in 1980 to maintain and repair typewriters and typesetting equipment. The company also dealt in reconditioned IBM electric typewriters and typesetters. Their customers included AIB, Bank of Ireland, Coyle Hamilton, FAS and Jones Lang, which all had large collections of electric typewriters, and the production department of The Irish Times.
Both founders came from the office products side of IBM. Matt Downey joined them as a director before I started there. There were just six people in the firm at that time.
The company was a classic example of a business run by technical people. I drew on my computer training to improve its internal processes and in 1982 I started to use microcomputers for this work. I wrote a dBASE II maintenance system on an ACT Sirius with twin floppy disk drives. We had to do an annual sort which entailed running a batch process from the first drive over to the second, then deleting the first file, doing the next level of the sort back and so on. This job ran overnight. By 1987, when we had moved to dBASE III on a faster machine – an IBM PS/2 model 50 – it took just seven minutes.
In early 1984 I joined the Work Stations board of directors, purchased a 10% shareholding in the company and was promoted to financial director. I was just 23 years old. The company also expanded into the equipment leasing business through a subsidiary company, Micro Investments, that was sold after I had left and sold my shareholding.
In 1985 I recruited Donie Holohan to take over financial management and I became sales director, leading Work Stations into the personal computer business. There were now about fifteen people in the company, including Kieran Brady, who had joined as a typewriter engineer and upskilled so that he could look after PCs.
I took a course run by Creative Management in Clontarf in order to learn about sales techniques. It lasted for eight weeks and involved getting to understand the sales process by listening to tapes and role playing.
Our new aim was to migrate the customer base onto PCs. Product distinctions were blurring in 1985. The PCs had become more versatile. Some companies were still selling dedicated word processors. Apple had introduced the Macintosh. Intergraph was offering graphical workstations for publishers. More and more people were willing to consider alternative technologies that were faster, better or cheaper than the systems that they were accustomed to. We were not strategic enough to study what other resellers were doing. We just knew that we needed to be in the PC business as our current market was in decline.
We used our typewriters as transitional products that reduced the fear factor for end users. It was now possible to attach an interface to an IBM typewriter so that it could double up as a PC printer. Some could also be fitted with a document feeder for this purpose. This strategy went very well, but the shift to PCs was a slow and incremental process, especially for organisations that had made large investments in mainframe systems.
Rowntree Mackintosh was our first PC customer. Goodbody Stockbrokers, Coyle Hamilton and PJ Carroll followed soon after.
The typesetters would soon migrate to PCs as well. Once WYSIWYG came along, the writing was on the wall for the older systems, but it took years for die-hard typesetters to move away from the IBM equipment. The evolution of laser printers was important here. Models that supported PostScript for the variable fonts that typesetters required were two or three times more expensive than ‘normal’ laser printers before Hewlett-Packard introduced the LaserJet II in the late 1980s.
IBM allowed Work Stations to sell its Wheelwriter electronic typewriter range, but did not accept the company as a PC dealer until 1991 when it launched the PS/1. We could, however, obtain its products in other ways. To get started we sourced three IBM Personal Computer XTs from a reseller in Northern Ireland and put them on show at an event in the Shelbourne Hotel. Rowntree Mackintosh bought one of those systems. IBM went mad.
Work Stations got into PC sales in an ad hoc way in the mid 1980s. At that stage IBM had the lion’s share of the market, but we were not qualified to be an IBM partner and our purchasing power was limited. We therefore looked outside the usual trade infrastructure. HE Clissmann supplied us with IBM-compatible machines. We sold these products to Amdahl, which did not want any IBM computers on its premises in Swords.
We put three PCs and a Novell network into Goodbody Stockbrokers. We also supplied Novell to IBM’s advertising agency Arks, despite the efforts of IBM to install its own local area network there.
We sourced modems and applications software through Ingram Micro in the UK. Ashton-Tate’s dBase II and MultiMate integrated with each other and MultiMate – unlike IBM’s Displaywrite software – was able to insert pound signs into documents. We sold the WordPerfect word processing package too. In all cases I wrote an amended interface file to print on the IBM electronic typewriter from a PC, producing the £ sign and 1.5 line spacing.
By 1989 Work Stations was partnering with database vendor DataEase and looking for software development opportunities. We also considered merging with another business and discussed this possibility with Typetec. Then a headhunter approached me on behalf of ComputerLand, which was the world’s largest personal computer retailer at the time.
ComputerLand ran an international network of franchised outlets that sold IBM, Compaq, HP and Toshiba products – to name just a few. I left Work Stations and, together with Karl Gallagher, set up Computers In Ireland Ltd, trading as ComputerLand. In May 1990 we opened a Dublin office, support and distribution centre in Airways Industrial Estate. We were the only truly multi-vendor outlet in Ireland at that time.
Because of the ComputerLand group’s bulk purchasing power, we were able to buy IBM PCs via Luxembourg at a discount rate of 51%. IBM Ireland never offered rates like that.
Last edit: March 2019
© Ed Horgan 2019