David Laird

I was working in the sales department of Williams and Woods in 1972 when they advertised internally for someone to train as a computer programmer. The company, which was located in an area bounded by Parnell Street and Kings Inn Street in Dublin, manufactured and distributed a wide range of food products, including Crosse & Blackwell and Chef sauces and pickles, Silvermints confectionery and Toblerone chocolate. It employed over 1000 people, and was an important part of the fabric of the Dublin’s north inner city for over 100 years.

I had other career opportunities at the time I applied for the trainee programmer job, but my father advised me that computers were the thing of the future – how right he was, and how lucky I was to receive that advice.

Williams and Woods, which was publicly quoted on the Irish Stock Exchange, had a very progressive approach to computing, driven by the financial controller, Don Holloway. I successfully got through the aptitude test and interview process and was selected to work under data processing (DP) department manager Michael Vickers. Michael went on to establish CompuPac in Sligo with Gerry McManus, and we are still close personal friends.

I received training to use the IBM RPG II programming language on an intensive six week course at IBM in Burlington Road. I’m not sure that I had ever seen a computer before this. Derek Wheeler provided most of the tuition while our IBM account manager, Charlie Craddock, kept an eye on my progress. There were around ten people on the course from various companies in Ireland, none of whom had any knowledge of computer programming. Looking back, there were only men on that course, albeit with a good spread of ages, me being the youngest.

As soon as the training concluded Michael and I set about writing software for order processing, invoicing, and debtors ledger systems. I was the programmer and Michael was the systems analyst who had defined the requirements and written the specs. There was a large element of training on the job with assistance from IBM stalwarts such as Denis Poynton and Noel Peare.

During that period, I was based full-time in the IBM installation centre in Burlington Road Dublin. IBM had set it up to accommodate organisations that developed systems prior to installing their first computers. The installation centre housed an IBM System/3 and was ably run by Maura Hendley, who ran a strict shop. We shared the computer with the other companies and pre-booked time slots to access the computer for software development and testing. These slots could be any time of the day or night.

The IBM System/3 model 10 in Williams and Woods was a 96 column card-based system with 16k of memory. It replaced an IBM 421 accounting machine, a 80 column card-based system which had been used for processing payroll.

The IBM System/3 and the RPG II language were designed to provide business solutions for medium size organisations. The power and reliability of the System/3, when combined with IBM’s systems engineers’ depth of business knowledge and technical support, ensured that the prospect of success was always high. In addition, RPG was a modern language with comparatively fast development times. I believe that the assistance we got from people in IBM who had broad experience of business systems was fundamental to our success, and the success of IBM minicomputers.

The go-live date in January 1973 was a big event for Williams and Woods. We invited the entire executive team to the computer room to witness the first day’s processing of sales orders on the new computer, with punch cards going in one end and printed orders coming out the other end.

We wrote a payroll system in six weeks in 1973. This was for a complex manufacturing and unionised organisation, so it was a major challenge. In larger organisations using mainframe computers the development of such a system would have taken years at the time.

I remember being given the task of writing the software for the shareholder management system. This included writing a program to print cheques. Unlike the later method of printing cheques, we didn’t have pre-printed boxes for each digit on the cheque. The normal way of writing cheques included commas inside numbers with four digits or more. I had to figure out how to cater for this and found it challenging, but I had a great feeling of satisfaction when, ultimately, I saw the live system printing cheques.

In 1973 I was headhunted by Norman Steele who was IT manager at Semperit Ireland. I worked alongside David Burke developing software. Again, we wrote a payroll system over a period of a few months.

Semperit Ireland was a tyre manufacturing company based in Ballyfermot, employing approximately 1000 people. Due to the scale of the business it was an important employer in the area. Again, I was there in the early days of computerisation. We ran an IBM System/3 model 8, which incorporated an 8-inch floppy disk drive. The Semperit installation also supported card processing.

Having become a computer programmer I felt it would be a good thing from my career perspective to study in the area of IT. There were only two evening courses available in Dublin at the time and I chose to do the Diploma in Systems Analysis course, which was a three year course in Trinity College Dublin. The fees were paid by my employer.

The course covered a wide range of IT related subjects including writing software in COBOL. Again, it was a card based system where we wrote the code on COBOL paper forms, submitted them to the Trinity computer centre where the punch card operators typed them and produced punch cards which we then submitted to the computer centre for compiling and testing. The people that I met on the course included Michael Daly who went on to become managing director in IBM Ireland, and Dick Brennan who was IT manager in Generali insurance company.

In 1974 I joined JS Lister, based in Dorset Street in Dublin. JS Lister was group of about eight engineering products companies. Christopher Fitzpatrick, former MD in Irish Steel, founded it in 1952 and the organisation grew very quickly on the back of a rapidly expanding Irish economy.

John Doddy was the CEO and had an interest in IT and what it could do for the company. Dermot Clarke, ex-IBM, was the DP manager when I joined. I was the programmer/systems analyst while Dominic Madden (who later set up Future Technology) was responsible for the operations of the DP department. We had an IBM System/3 with removable hard disks, each with 2.5k storage, in addition to diskette drives. This was a major step forward from the card systems. I remember I sat at a desk in the accounts department and had to ask for a quieter environment because I couldn’t concentrate on software development with the number of comings and goings in the room.

JS Lister set up Lister Organisation Management Services as a computer bureau for the companies within the group. They delivered physical orders to us, we keyed in the data, produced printed invoices and statements and posted them to customers. We also did weekly payroll for each company. All the software was written in-house, including systems for sales order processing, invoicing, debtors ledger, creditors ledger, stock control, nominal ledger and payroll. At one stage we started to provide bureau services to external organisations, but that was soon discontinued. In 1978 we installed a IBM System/34.

Throughout this period in the various organisations, I worked for we often worked very long hours, even through the night on occasions. This was because it took between an hour and an hour and a half to compile a program and then run a test. So, it was a very slow process.

On one occasion in Semperit we worked a full week, arrived in on a Saturday morning and worked through the night until 5.00 p.m. on the Sunday and then worked the full week again from Monday. This was to meet a deadline, and the work was challenging but enjoyable. And we weren’t paid for overtime. Willingness to do this was influenced in my view by the ‘can do’ attitude I encountered in IBM, where the emphasis was on ‘getting the job done’, as against working certain hours. This contrasted with a culture in Ireland at the time where trade unions had a lot of power which was often exercised through strike action.

In 1978 I moved from Dublin to Enniscorthy to be the data processing manager in J. Donohoe – a company established in 1876 and owned by the Kickham family. Its interests included mineral water manufacture, drinks distribution, and motor and agricultural machinery sales and servicing. Michael Kickham and Dan Kickham were joint CEOs. They were enthusiastic about the competitive advantage the company could achieve through computerisation and had installed an IBM System/32 there in 1978. This was the second installation of a business computer in County Wexford, the first one being in Wexford County Council.

The nature of the drinks distribution business is that there are a lot of lines on each invoice. Orders consist of a dozen of this and two dozen of that, and there are a lot of drinks varieties. The System/32 required a punch card for each line on an invoice. So, for the month end sales analysis we had to sort about 60,000 cards. These were sorted and lifted from one card stacker to another – and if you dropped a stack of cards, the sort had to be started again.

The System/32 was a single user system with limited disk storage, most of which was used to process the operating system and the application programs. There wasn’t enough to accommodate the amount of data we needed, which is why we had so many punch cards. We upgraded from the System/32 to a System/34 in 1979 which gave us an adequate amount of disk space so that we could at long last abandon punch cards. It also gave us, for the first time, access to a multi-user platform. Not only could the DP department staff gain access to the computer, but users could now also input data through terminals. This was a fundamental change in computing.

In 1979 we purchased a stock control system from AMS to manage the spare parts stock at the J. Donohoe motor business. Joe Gorman from AMS came to Enniscorthy to help us install the software, which replaced a Kardex system. There were about 20000 separate stock keeping units. I can remember being dispatched to tell the woman who was responsible for maintaining the Kardex records that we were going to replace them with a computer. I was nervous that she might push back and want to keep the Kardex, but her first question to me was whether she would be able to operate the system sitting down – when I said yes, she was happy. This was utterly unexpected, but it was an important lesson for me in systems implementation – always expect the unexpected.

I also remember that we purchased two modems from Cara Data Processing in 1979. This was to connect the IBM System/34 with a remote site in J. Donohoe. The person we dealt with in Cara was Mick Rogers who subsequently became MD in Cara. I felt at that time, that the connection of a remote site was very progressive.

This testimony continues in the ‘Lives of the PC dealers 1978-88’ archive. Click here to view.

Last edit: December 2022

© David Laird 2022