Finbarr Power

The company had just moved into its new premises in Ballybrit when I joined Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in June 1973. My knowledge about computers was confined to what I had learned about binary code in Leaving Cert maths classes.

I had gone to school in Galway and was called for an interview at the company on the Monday after my final exam. The results came out in August and, following discussions with my manager Chris Keating, I opted to stay at Digital instead of going into further education. I attended the company’s own evening classes – it called them ‘twilight tech’ – where the non-technical staff learned about computers. This training enabled them to transfer to technical jobs. I got a good grounding in the basics of computing, but decided after a while that my interests were not aligned to working as a build or test technician. A career in people-facing roles seemed more attractive.

The Digital Equipment facility viewed from the air in 1973. The building grew much bigger in the following years.
(Photo source: Chris Coughlan. Photographer unknown.)

My early exposure to the American style of management was to have a huge influence on my later career. This looked very different to me from the management style in most Irish companies. It seemed to be open and inclusive. The managers wanted to build a consensus instead of just issuing orders.

Many of the people that Digital employed in Galway went on lead other companies in Ireland and in all over the world. Kevin Melia became the president of Sun Microsystems Computer Company in the US, then set up contract manufacturing company MSL. Brian Long founded semiconductor design firm Parthus Technologies. And Jim O’Hara was the general manager at Intel Ireland.

I spent five years at the Galway factory. The number of employees there rose from around 250 when I joined to over 1,200 when I left. I worked in the department that served customers in southern Europe, acting in a liaison role between the factory and DEC’s field offices. All of our communications were through English, as this was the company language.

The plant built systems to order for each of its customers. Its assembly process was constantly evolving. When I joined, most the components were brought over from the US and much of the production work involved attaching them to circuit boards. Over time we sourced more of the components within Europe and some of the suppliers started to deliver fully populated boards.

Many people in the industry still believed that minicomputers were not real computers. This mindset changed when Digital experienced a very rapid growth in demand for its PDP-8 and PDP-11 minicomputers and became a significant player across Europe. Some customers ordered large volumes of these systems for integration into process control systems. Reuters and CERN bought thousands of them. This high demand resulted in very long lead times – up to 18 months at one point.

The first big shift I saw in Digital’s technology was the replacement of core memory with semiconductor memory. This led to a big drop in the price of the hardware, faster processing speeds and a significant drop in delivery lead times. The more stable hardware also required fewer environmental controls and over time customers no longer needed to build air-conditioned computer rooms.

By the middle of the decade the PDP-11 took over most of the floorspace in Ballybrit and PDP-8s were increasingly used as process controllers. VDUs had also started to appear. Digital now produced a number of operating systems, allowing the machines to be all things to all people. Applications building skills were becoming more available. OEMs would add value through their own software or hardware. Digital was the globally pre-eminent OEM supplier at that time.

When the company commissioned the construction of  a new factory at Ayr in Scotland I was offered a position there. I was also offered a position in the US, but that never happened. Instead I started travelling regularly to Ayr to communicate with customers. A protracted strike in the Department of Posts and Telegraphs prevented me from making phone calls from Galway. So I went over to Scotland, carrying piles of printouts that contained the information I needed, and I made the calls from there.

In 1978 I happened to be the only Galway employee at an official dinner to mark the opening of the Ayr facility, so I spoke on behalf of the Galway organisation.

After I made this speech, someone tapped me on the shoulder and asked me if I had ever considered a career in sales. My immediate response was ‘Are you joking ?’ Very quickly, however, I agreed to resign from Digital Equipment International in Galway and to join Digital Equipment Ireland in Dublin, where I took up a new job as a sales associate.

This was a time of unprecedented demand for computer people by companies across the globe. Digital needed a pipeline to deliver a sufficient number of computer salespeople in Europe, so it had set up a year-long internal training programme. The participants spent one month at the start of the course, and another month at the end, in Digital’s sales training school in France – just across the border from its European headquarters in Geneva. The classroom training included configuring computers to manage specified workloads and understanding the various operating systems that the company offered.

After my first spell in the training  facility, I returned to Dublin and met Pat O’Sullivan, who headed the Digital office there. He had entered the computer business in England, where he joined Honeywell UK. He was subsequently transferred to that company’s office in Dublin. When DEC recruited him in 1974, he started selling its systems from his house in Malahide. The company opened its first Irish sales office in the following year. This reported into the Manchester office, but was left to its own devices in most respects.

Pat O’Sullivan: ‘Mr Digital’ in Ireland

I remember my very first encounter with Pat as a trainee, because he gave me the keys to Digital’s field service van and told me to drive it to the airport. He wanted me to pick up a portable stand for the Computex exhibition that was about to be held at the Burlington Hotel. That show became a baptism of fire for me, because of the wide range of visitors’ questions that I had to answer.

Digital’s cramped office in Park House was like a big family. When I arrived in 1978, there were about 20 people in the organisation. Administrator Patricia Flahive had been the company’s second employee after Pat. Vic Saunders, Derek MacHugh, John Gray, Frank Brennan, Gerry Tierney and Brian Mahoney worked in sales. Vernon Clay was the software manager and Tod Reilly was in charge of customer service. Charlie McCormick, John Kilroy and Seamus Connolly were the service engineers.

Derek took over the management role at Digital Equipment Ireland after I joined. Pat requested this change so that he would be able to focus on sales and business development. I had the pleasure of being his wing man for the rest of his time at the company.

Pat O’Sullivan was a real people person. He was able to get customers to make purchasing decisions by the force of his belief in a product and through his personality. He had a fascination with the fast pace of change in computer technology and read all the manuals so that he could overcome peoples’ fears and objections.

Pat was known as ‘the juggler’ because of his facility for lateral thinking. This allowed him to be the ultimate problem solver for customers, who knew that he would be their champion inside Digital. It was as if he extended the Park House family ethos into places like the universities and government departments.

To the best of my knowledge, there was no other country in the world where DEC stitched up the education sector in the way that Pat did. I remember, for example, how TCD and UCD became DECSYSTEM-20 users. The universities wanted this equipment, but budget constraints were always a big issue and they simply did not have the funds. Pat, the supreme problem solver, came up with the idea of establishing a structured government purchasing plan. The more that the Irish state purchased from Digital, the more discount it received. The CDPS agreed to this arrangement, allowing Pat to apply the new government discount to the university systems and thus to overcome the pricing obstacle.

Soon afterwards the Department of Education went out to tender for multiple computers, aiming to install identical machines in every regional technical college. Pat won that deal as well.

Among the OEMs in Ireland was Applied Management Systems, whose founders Matt Crotty and Tony Foran had known Pat in Honeywell. They developed an education administration package and sold PDP-8s with paper tape drives to some of the vocational educational committees.

Another OEM, GC McKeown, developed a range of commercial applications and worked jointly with Digital on some projects. These included Crown Controls and the Great Southern Hotel group. Mike Peirce’s Mentec was initially a provider of more technical solutions. Later, however, it took over Online Computing and expanded into the commercial area.

By 1980 Digital Equipment Ireland was starting to look like a grown up company. Business schools describe individuals like Pat as ‘missionary’ salespeople. When they achieve all that they can in one place, they seek new challenges.

Prime Computer looked like it might become the next Digital. Its computers had a consistent architecture and they all ran the Primos operating system. Its networking technologies were also good. Memory Ireland took on the agency for these products and asked Pat to head its Prime division. Pat accepted the role. When he left Digital, Vernon Clay, John Kilroy and I moved with him.

We found it extremely difficult to compete against DEC, especially in the public sector. The company was firmly established as the preferred vendor there. Tenders were Digital’s to lose.

Our first customer for Prime was a research organisation on the St Patrick’s College campus in Drumcondra. It needed a computer that supported SPSS for statistical work. That, however, was the hardest sale that I ever experienced. We had to fight head-to-head against the guys in in DEC. I  now believe that I won the order only because of what Pat had taught me.

Pat, Vernon and I left Memory after two years. Once again the change was driven by Pat, who saw enormous potential in the emerging microcomputer arena. By the time we left, the Memory bureau had converted its antiquated punch card system to run on Prime and we were well down the road with deals at Irish Continental Lines and Ulster Polytechnic. Both subsequently installed Prime systems.

In later years Pat O’Sullivan established IDS Computers and set up a dealer network for Wang. He was only 47 when he died of cancer in November 1987.

Pat’s time with DEC was certainly the pinnacle of his career. He achieved hero status inside the company and, even after he left, people always thought of him as ‘Mr Digital’ in Ireland. DEC would not have been as successful as it was in its early stages without a visionary like him. With the strength of DEC behind him he was able to take a large piece of the market.

I worked in the Middle East in the 1980s. Back in Ireland again in 1989, I set up International Translation & Publishing which did a lot of work with IBM, translating products from its labs in America. I saw how Ireland accidentally became the centre of the localisation business. But that is another story.

Last edit: September 2017

© Finbarr Power 2017