When I worked in the Wolfson Signal Processing Unit, Queen’s University Belfast in 1983, CAD systems were very expensive and the CAD system that we used cost around £110,000. Then the IBM PC came along… I discovered that a £10,000 CAD software package could deliver equivalent capabilities and amazingly, the PC system that ran this application could also run word processing software and many other applications including something called Lotus 1-2-3!
My background was in electronic engineering and I held a masters degree in that subject. The closest I came to software development on my electronics course was programming in Fortran and Assembler. I had taken a year out of college in 1979/80 and worked at MSCS in Lisburn. This company was selling Apple IIs and Commodore PETs, and I discovered early on how very flexible these machines could be. As a sign of how embryonic the ‘computer sector’ was in late 1970s, I remember one occasion when I let a potential customer into the MSCS premises and noted how irked he was – he had to visit us to buy a computer whereas for every other aspect of his business, sales people had to visit him!
Around late 1983 I felt an urge to set up a business and started to search around for ideas. The computer science department at Queen’s had a collection of technical magazines from the US so I scanned them to learn about what was new technology wise. That’s when I discovered the IBM PC – I was very taken by the fact that this machine could be anything from an advanced CAD system to a word processor and, being backed by IBM, it meant a lot of software and hardware was being developed for it. That’s when I decided to focus the activity of the business on the PC.
Desi McGlade worked with me at the Wolfson unit and was also planning to leave Queen’s. We started taking about PCs and we considered our options.
We knew that IBM didn’t sell its PCs through start-ups. Compaq, the leading and ‘coolest’ alternative had started operations in the UK in early 1984, but was only accepting dealers already accredited by IBM. We had to look around for an alternative product and chose the Corona PC from California.
We registered Business and Industrial Computer (BIC) Systems in June 1984 and rented a small office on Antrim Road. We raised funds from our parents but these were limited so we had to watch the costs and as a result, Desi was first to go into the business whilst I worked evenings and weekends for no salary. I left Queen’s about a year later and took on the title of technical director to try and give an impression that the company was bigger than it actually was. It was also appropriate because we were a primarily a technically-led business at the start.
In 1984 there were still only a handful of microcomputer resellers in and around Belfast. MSCS was now working with several PC manufacturers. ICS Computing had been appointed as an IBM dealer. PC Consultants started up at around the same time as we did and went on to be the first Compaq reseller in Northern Ireland. CEM sold Apples and later promoted Apricot, while Sherwood Systems offered Olivetti. The early market broadly split between application-led resellers (accounts software, word processing and so on) and corporate led resellers (primarily networking). Our destiny was clearly in the corporate sector.
As electronics design engineers, we also had other options beyond PCs. We marketed an ultra-niche in-circuit emulation (ICE) product from Microtek, known as MICE, and took on occasional development projects. On one occasion we designed an interface board to turn an Apple II into a production control device for STC. We used a design package allied to a dot matrix printer to produce the circuit board layout and placed an order with Shannon Circuits for a batch of 80 units.
The Corona relationship just about got us started and didn’t last long before we moved on to the ITT Xtra – a high quality IBM compatible system which we ‘chipped’ to increase its CPU performance by 33%! For us this was a relatively simple thing to do but seemed to impress customers no end.
We were starting to build a reputation and by 1986 our third director Johnny Convery, also an electronics engineer, joined the business. Like me this was initially on a part-time basis before he joined full time to take over the MICE electronic design automation (EDA) business. By then we also had Maura McGourty running the back office.
Two new industry partnerships became important for BIC Systems. The first was ICL after it obtained distribution in Ireland for the ITT Xtra range circa spring 1985. We needed to get approval from ICL’s branch office in Holywood Road, Belfast. As part of the process, the local manager gave myself and Desi a real grilling. The other partner was Ashton-Tate after it became the UK distributor for Javelin Software, developer of an advanced financial modelling and data analysis product that we had distributed in Ireland.
Ed Vernon in 1985 at the time of the BIC Systems launch.
(Photograph courtesy of Desi McGlade)
BIC Systems was belatedly launched in the autumn of 1985 and we encouraged ICL and Ashton-Tate put up the money to ‘go big’. The venue chosen was the Culloden Hotel and with my long standing experience as a drummer/band member, I knew how to put on a ‘lights and sounds’ show. We worked with a PR company for ideas and expertise and senior executives from ICL and Ashton-Tate agreed to participate. We created invitations with the tagline ‘Would you pay a dime to see this man?’ and tried to get hold of 1,000 American dimes to attach to each invitation. That proved impossible so reluctantly we just printed the image of a dime onto the invitations instead which ruined the concept. However, BBC news plus nearly 200 people came along to the event which was a huge turnout – especially since we had only three full time staff. It had the hoped for impact and in the months after that we started to win our first orders from large companies and government departments.
The ICL relationship introduced us to Short Bros, the largest corporate in NI. Shorts wanted a PC network for the accountancy department and we knew about networks from our time at Queen’s so we managed to get an early version of Microsoft MS-Net working with an ITT PC as the file server. A few years later, we put the very first PC network into the Northern Ireland government. The Department of Health and Social Services wanted a 3Com LAN Manager network. I strongly recommended they NOT use this as it was only at Version 1 release. However that’s what they tendered for – we won the tender and paid the price. We had to put significant resource into making this work over the following six to eight months – we didn’t make any money on that deal, of course, but we considerably enhanced our reputation and skills.
In late 1986 we opened new, high-profile premises in York Street, Belfast. With the extra space we set up a training centre led by Anne Clydesdale and took on more people including software developers. However, shortly after we moved into the new facility a group of staff departed to start another business. Losing five of the twelve people in the company made for a very tough time, plus costs had escalated, but we were helped by the EDA activities and eventually we built a better business platform as a consequence.
By October 1988, BIC Systems had 25 employees, including a new batch of former university staff. It was not hard for the company to attract people because we had good growth and I always felt that growth was the currency of opportunity for ambitious people. Many people from outside the computer industry had attempted to set up PC related businesses but by this point the sector had started to stratify and we were seen as one of the top three resellers.
The product line-up at BIC Systems kept changing, mainly because the industry as a whole was so volatile. The ICL partnership didn’t last, partly because ICL had little experience of managing resellers and decided it wasn’t interested in PCs. We took on Apollo workstations and sold them with electronic CAD applications. We teamed up with Honeywell Bull – as it became known in 1987 – at a time when the company wanted to grow a PC business and we became interested in their Unix systems. We also supplied a Unix-based office automation system to the Northern Bank.
On applications software we majored on AutoCAD for architectural and mechanical design. We got drawn into a ‘me too’ activity with accountancy solutions, in our case from Tetra Business Systems, which we were not successful with and eventually sold this business to a competitor. However in the corporate space we were growing apace primarily led by our PC local area network (LAN) expertise. For this we majored on Novell NetWare which was fast and reliable and enabled us build a reputation as a leader in this area.
LAN projects were good for building strong customer relationships. These often required us to over-resource technical problems but this was OK in the context of building long term value and growth into the business. In 1988 we installed the first fibre optic network in government by stringing a single link between two adjacent buildings – looking back this was quite trivial but at the time it was seen as a significant piece of work.
Along the way we eventually teamed up with our favourite company and product range, namely Compaq (COMPAtibility & Quality) who by 1987 had overtaken IBM as the industry’s gold standard. IBM had become increasingly conflicted by the PC’s cannibalisation of its proprietary products. However Compaq was exclusively a PC manufacturer and laser focused on growth exclusively through its reseller channel. This distribution model meant that the largest resellers across the US and Europe were more likely to invest in and promote Compaq products and the rest, as they say, is history.
By the late 1980s the NI public sector had become our biggest single sector, though happily we also had strength through being diversified into other spaces. The size of our public sector business was no surprise given the historic imbalance in Northen Ireland between the larger public sector and smaller private sector and this, unfortunately, remains the case to this day. Meantime we had also built a significant Ireland-wide business on the back of our EDA and CAD activities which were both very niche and high value.
By 1989 our headcount had grown to over 30. In 1990, after we added a ‘Dublin’ office in Santry, it rose to over 40. And by the end of the century, BIC Systems employed circa 200 people.
Last edit: October 2018
© Ed Vernon 2018