David Little spent 38 years with Cara Data Processing, an IT products and services group that experienced several changes of ownership and evolved in line with the technologies that it offered.
He worked at Cara from its inception in 1971 as an Aer Lingus subsidiary, headed the business following a management buy out from Groupe Bull and helped to sell the company to BT in 2005.
When I completed a masters degree in computer applications in Trinity College in 1970 I applied for jobs in the fledgling computer industry and was offered positions at Aer Lingus and Irish Biscuits. The starting salary at Aer Lingus was £25 per annum greater – graduates received a little extra there – and so I became the eleventh staff member of its system services team.
This group had been set up two years earlier by Maurice Foley (who later became the CEO of aircraft leasing firm Guinness Peat Aviation) with the mandate to sell excess computer capacity at the airline, following its purchase of two IBM mainframes to handle reservations. Aer Lingus restructured the system services division as a subsidiary company, Cara Data Processing Ltd, in 1971.
I was one of three graduate trainees taken on in 1970. The others (both from Cork) were Ted Murphy and Ray Guinan. I spent the next couple of years in application development (Cobol, Fortran and PL/I). I remember Maurice Foley remarking on how young the company was – the average age there was just 26 or 27. None of us objected to working long hours. It was not unusual for staff to enter the computer room at midnight, work through the night on test runs and code corrections, leave between 5am and 6am and be back at their desks by 9am.
My first real assignment was to be part of a team, led by Tom Wall, that wrote programs to convert New Ireland Insurance’s policies from pounds, shillings and pence to the new decimal currency. Four developers from Cara and two New Ireland people worked together on an ICL 1900 mainframe inside the insurance company. Processing jobs on this machine could take up to eight hours, which required enormous accuracy in coding. Any mistake could take days to rectify.
I returned to the Aer Lingus Head Office at Dublin Airport in mid-1972 and two things immediately struck me. Cara had grown to over 60 people and I knew very few of them. And application development was now on the two IBM System/360 mainframes – a Model 65 and a Model 50 – whose processing power was massively greater than the ICL 1900. I led, or was a member of, teams that developed systems for MDL, Conoco Oil, VHI, Renault, Loctite, Johnson Bros and Coras Trachtala.
In late 1973 Denis McMahon persuaded me to join the Cara sales and marketing team, which he headed. It seems extraordinary in retrospect but, almost immediately, I sold a key-to-disk system that earned me enough commission to get married in 1974. This product – a Data 100 Keybatch – went to VHI (one of my old clients as a developer).
Cara’s mainframe-based bureau, run by Emmet Wilson, provided payroll and batch processing services. During this period the bureau found it very challenging to attract new business as more companies were installing in-house minicomputers. These were supplied by IBM, DEC, ICL, Nixdorf and others. We argued that running a computer entailed all kinds of overheads, making this option more expensive than using a bureau.
We also encountered new challenges to our batch bureau service from start-ups like ICS Computing, which was owned by Ulster Bank. Its Timelink accounting and payroll service was based on Digital’s PDP-11 technology and offered online connections. In time Cara would launch Caralink, its own online bureau service. Long afterwards, in 1996, Cara acquired the customer base and staff of the Dublin branch of ICS.
David Little and Ted Murphy in 1978
(Photo source: Cara News Autumn 1978. Photographer unknown.)
Cara responded to the rise of the mini in 1976 by launching a new product: the Datapoint 2200. Ray Guinan took charge of selling this system. It resembled the microcomputers that came later, as it had a screen, keyboard, program storage and a multi-chip CPU. We, however, described it as a minicomputer and sold it with a standard set of applications software. Datapoint had originally designed the machine as a terminal. Rival suppliers highlighted this fact and we found a lot of resistance from prospective clients. Nonetheless, more than a dozen customers bought the system and the Irish Sugar Company became our largest Datapoint user.
In 1977, following a company reorganisation, I was appointed general manager of Caralink – a new timesharing service that would complement, but not compete against, the existing mainframe bureau. Customers would use dial-up modems to access the Caralink computer. DEC refused to deal with a Datapoint partner, so we had to find an alternative hardware vendor. Gordon Clarke, the manager of Cara Consulting, chose BTI Computer Systems and its BTI 4000 minicomputer.
All the members of the initial Caralink team moved across from other parts of the Cara group. Ted Murphy and Don Lehane joined me to provide technical and operational support. Alan McGrath and Norman Hewson would sell the service.
BTI, which was based in California, helped us to find software in the US and we launched Caralink with accounting and stock control applications. The majority of our clients adopted these. We leveraged Aer Lingus to sell Caralink in the travel trade, signing up Sunbound Travel and Cara Travel. Distribution firms Blackwood Hodge, Monsell Mitchell and Stafford Lynch also became customers.
Fast communications over telephone lines was essential to the successful running of such a venture. Time and time again, the computer industry was frustrated by the services available from the only phone company of the day. The Department of Posts and Telegraphs was slow to deliver lines and restricted us to 300 baud, half-duplex modems. An IBETA delegation (of which I was a part) visited the department to complain about these limitations. The meeting was very pleasant, but we were eventually told in so many words ‘Really, we have too many internal problems of our own to deal with, to worry about customers’ problems’.
Companies like Cara started installing 1200 baud full-duplex modems secretly (sometimes below floorboards) to help deliver a reasonable service to our customers. We also set up a communications equipment business, the Cara Datacomm division, headed by Malcolm Banks. Cara become the leading supplier of leased lines, using Racal-Milgo modems and Timeplex multiplexors, over a very short period of time. We supplied communications solutions to AIB, BOI, Ulster Bank, nearly all of the insurance companies and government departments including the Department of Social Welfare.
Don Lehane departed in 1979 and Cara appointed Mick Fitzpatrick as its technical support manager.
In late 1980 I was appointed general manager of support services, which included both bureau services – the batch processing service based on IBM mainframes and the timesharing service based on BTI – as well as all software development.
Advertisement from Cara News Autumn 1978.
The Caralink service continued to thrive. In 1982 we replaced the original machine with the more powerful BTI 8000 that supported more simultaneous customers and provided faster response times. We began to lose Caralink customers in the mid 1980s and the last customer bowed out in 1987 – ten years after we had introduced the service.
Many batch bureau clients, meanwhile, had moved their financial packages onto in-house minicomputers, feeling that these gave them better control and faster access to data. But they preferred to leave their payroll with the bureau. Its software accommodated the legislative changes that happened on a regular basis and allowed users to adjust their employees’ pay at the last minute. We therefore decided to focus on payroll as a niche market. In time we developed Carapay as the leading payroll service in the country and expanded it into a full human resources system.
Cara made a final attempt to sell minicomputers in 1980, when it became a Hewlett-Packard agent. Once again we targeted the travel trade and supplied an HP 3000 to Airmotive Ireland. We also sold an HP 3000 to control the manufacturing process at Irish Steel, but ran into software difficulties. We brought in an application from the USA for a manufacturing process that worked on the basis of extracting raw materials from steel ore. The Irish Steel facility in Cork had a different production system based on scrap metal. It took a powerful effort on both sides to get that application working.
In November 1979 I participated in an ICSA conference that featured one set of presentations from bureau operators and another set by advocates of the in-house computer. The conclusion (if I remember correctly) was that the bureau would survive, but that the minicomputer would eventually win out, given the range of applications software that was then available. This is what eventually happened.
Last edit: October 2018
© David Little 2018