Eóin Meehan is an IT consultant and lecturer based in Cavan. He has managed projects for Intel, Dell, Stratejii and St John Ambulance Ireland and taught at Griffith College, National College of Ireland and Dublin Business School. He has also worked on EU funded research projects at Trinity College Dublin.
This testimony covers a section of his career that centred on Digital Equipment’s VAX platform and Innosoft’s PDMF email software.
I left school in 1979 and I hadn’t a clue what I wanted to do, but I remember myself and a pal decided that we were going to “get into computers”. We were both science fiction fans and we’d obviously been watching the NASA missions in the 70s. So we thought, yeah, this is what we want to do and both applied to AnCO for a training course in computer programming techniques.
I was called to an interview with some company called “Digital Equipment Corporation”. I’d never heard this company. I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I went along to the interview anyway. My pal got an interview with the Irish Computer Training School in Tallaght, Dublin, and they used ICL equipment with a state-of-the-art ME29. It was interesting that our career paths then diverged; he ended up going down the ICL, then IBM, route and I went down the Digital route.
AnCO had contracted Digital to run a nine-month computer programming techniques course at their headquarters at Park House on the North Circular Road. I think there were about 15 of us on the course. It covered several topics including programming in the Macro-32 Assembly language, Basic Plus, Basic Plus 2, DIBOL, COBOL and RPG-III. I found it all really fascinating and took to it like a duck to water. The course was run by Digital EduServices and the guy in charge was Kevin Mackey.
I got a job out of that working as a programmer with ICS Computing in Dublin. Ulster Bank owned ICS at the time and it had three offices in Ireland – Belfast, Dublin, and Cork. This was a software house that had a timesharing service based on two Digital Equipment PDP 11/70. People would connect using VT52 green-screen terminals and printers across a V.23 dial-up modem and run a standard suite of accounting and payroll package. ICS also sold applications software that was written in DIBOL and came from a company in America called MCBA. They had a licence to take the software and modify it as necessary.
I left ICS and went to join Online Computing in Sandycove, Dublin. I commuted there by train. This was a time when Ireland was undergoing a sort of “technofication”. Just as the telecommunications service was about to jump from electro-mechanical equipment to fully digital switches, the suburban rail service was preparing to upgrade from diesel-pulled, 1950s, dilapidated and unheated carriages to state of the art electric commuter trains.
Online Computing was set up by Denis McMahon, Ted Murphy, and Frank Waters. They also got a licence to modify the MCBA software and went into competition with ICS. An interesting company to work for. We wrote lots of software packages based on the MCBA stuff for companies including Fast Fit Exhausts, Coolmore Stud, Kylemore Bakeries, Tennant and Ruttle, Carton Brothers and Rathborne Candles. It was fascinating how a standard order entry system could be modified to serve these diverse industries.
I was more interested in operating systems and computer management than in commercial programming. At the time, I knew the VAX range of computers was becoming much more popular and I was very interested in getting into that side of the business. So I left Online in 1984 for a systems manager opportunity at Smith (Group Services) Ltd which had a small VAX 11/750.
Smith Group was founded by Con Smith, who had tragically been killed in an air crash in 1972. Among other businesses, it held the Renault car franchise for Ireland.
The VAX ran accounting consolidation services for the entire group. It started my journey with VMS (“God’s Own Operating System”). It also gave me an opportunity to get involved with DECUS, which was a wonderful source of information and friendship. We were part of DECUS, UK, Ireland and Middle East and eventually I was part of the team that founded the DECUS Ireland Chapter.
After Smiths I joined Cognotec, which also had a VAX 11/750 running VMS. Cognotec’s idea was to deliver up-to-the-minute financial information such as foreign exchange rates to businesses in Ireland.
Brian Maccaba had set up the company under the auspices of the CII and our headquarters was in Confederation House in Kildare Street.
If you wanted to access foreign exchange information or banking reference information in 1985, you basically had to have an expensive subscription to a service from Reuters or Telerate. Cognotec’s plan was to provide a much, much cheaper alternative using videotex.
This testimony continues in the ‘How the internet came to Ireland 1987-97’ archive. Click here to view.
Last edit: April 2024
© Eóin Meehan 2024