Frank Cole

Undergraduates had no access to the first computer at Trinity College Dublin. I was one of only four or five students who took the electronics strand of the engineering degree. While we were shown the university’s IBM 1620, we never used it for anything. Our education in electronic engineering was essentially a course in applied maths.

After graduating from Trinity in 1966 I joined Marconi Radar Systems in England and was sent to the company’s college to learn about programming and computer systems design. This was like doing a masters degree. I ended up in the division of Marconi that produced air defence and air traffic control systems, using the company’s own Myriad computer – a 24-bit machine. During my time there I also managed the first human trials with touchscreens. Marconi engineers were developing these for use by air traffic control personnel.

From 1968 to 1970 I worked at Honeywell Computer Systems in Croydon, providing technical advice to its commercial customers. Their applications were almost always for accounting and payroll, whereas my speciality was real-time computing. Honeywell never enabled me to work in that area, so I moved to Univac as a pre-sales consultant. The corporate culture there was quite different. Univac was an old-school supplier of very big computers, such as the reservations system at British European Airways. My next stop, Allied Business Systems, was the UK reseller of Computer Automation‘s Alpha 16 minicomputer. That company offered me a substantial pay rise after it had beaten Univac for a deal at Thorn Electrical Industries. By 1973, however, I was looking around for something new.

A friend who worked for Hewlett-Packard in Vienna lined up an interview for me there. HP was looking for a technical support guy for its business in Russia – someone who would work at first in computer pre-sales with a view to moving into a sales role later on. I took the job. And in due course I became the computer sales manager for the Soviet Union.

The Iron Curtain was still in place and HP’s Vienna office was its headquarters for eastern Europe. There were 60 or 70 people working there, but very few of them were involved with sales in Austria. Small teams of two or three people were responsible for HP product divisions inside individual countries in the eastern bloc. From 1974 to 1977 I lived in Moscow for about two thirds of the time – at first in a hotel, then in an apartment building assigned to foreigners. As a resident, indeed, I had to apply for an exit visa whenever I wanted to leave the Soviet Union.

Hewlett-Packard had a lovely atmosphere compared with Honeywell or Univac. The company was run according to ‘the HP way’, which struck me as a very upright culture. Its philosophy was based on honesty, truthfulness and openness. The organisation structure was much flatter than in other companies and people usually worked in small groups. If a department grew to have 100 staff, it would be split into two. Managers seldom had their own offices and, where they existed, those rooms had glass walls and open doors. Everyone addressed everyone else by their first name.

When I joined HP, it still earned most of its money from test and measurement instruments. But the company’s computer division was growing fast and getting most of the publicity.

Hewlett-Packard had entered the computer business in the mid-1960s because its instruments were getting faster and the company needed better ways to monitor and manage them. It came close to acquiring Digital Equipment for this purpose, but decided to produce its own minicomputers instead. The HP 2100 series – which was renamed HP 1000 in the 1970s – had a similar design to Digital’s PDP-8 and a very good real-time operating system for industrial applications. I sold a lot of them in Russia, including the biggest ever configuration which went to the USSR Institute for Standards.

HP became the leader in international computer sales into the USSR in the 1970s – or, to be more accurate, the leader in legal transactions. I heard many stories of systems that entered Russia in other ways.

Every legitimate sales contract had to be approved by two organisations: the US Department of Commerce and CoCom – a semi-secret outfit in Paris. Computer shipments were restricted by limits on their processing speeds and required individual certificates that specified exactly who the system was for and how they would use it. The general principle was that these computers should be at least one generation less advanced than those available in the west. I recall one objection from the US Department of Defence, when it found out that the HP 2100 was microprogrammable and could therefore be made to run up to five times faster than the speed in its specifications.

The Soviets also imposed restrictions on suppliers. The government was our only customer. We had to sell everything through an agency called Elektronorgtechnica, which was controlled by the Ministry of Foreign Trade. We were not permitted to deal with actual users. The only direct contacts arose during massive trade exhibitions that the government ran. HP would set up a stand in the American pavilion and, every so often, a professor from some Soviet institute approached us. Some already were HP users. Others wanted to talk about our computers because they were gathering information for their own negotiations with Elektronorgtechnica.

My job sometimes took me into places that foreigners did not normally see, including the Space Institute, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna – a town outside Moscow that was built to house nuclear scientists – and a medical clinic that served members of the Politburo. In February 1977 I was also a witness to the fire killed 42 people at the Hotel Rossiya in central Moscow. One of my HP colleagues had left his belongings in a bedroom there and we returned to retrieve them on the following day. I accessed the damaged, but still intact, room by marching past a security guard, declaring that I was a diplomat.

I would never have had experiences like that if I had stayed in Dublin. Less than a year afterwards, though, I had returned there, following a short spell representing HP in Czechoslovakia. I had heard that the company was setting up in Dublin and applied for a position at the new office. I had never actually had a job in Ireland before.

At the back of my mind when I returned was advice that HP co-founder Dave Packard had given me. While I was in Moscow he had spent three days there to attend meetings of a US-Soviet trade association. I got to talk with him quite a lot and he told me about different start-ups that he had assisted in California. I mentioned that I would also like to set up a new business some day. He said to make sure that it was a product company rather than a service provider. By the time of my transfer to HP Ireland I was therefore looking out for product development opportunities.

‘This one did not look like any that I had seen before’… The service area of HP Ireland’s office in Avonbeg, as seen in 1979 in a photograph by Ted Hearne. The cabinet to the right of the desk contains an HP 1000 computer with an HP 7970 tape drive installed above the processing unit.
(Photograph courtesy of Ted Hearne)

In January 1978 I reported to the Hewlett-Packard office in Avonbeg Industrial Estate, where Ted Hearne and Mai Brown were already working. Its physical appearance was a shock. HP normally chose very good offices and this one did not look like any that I had seen before. It was like joining a start-up although, of course, this one already had products available. I really believed in the quality of our systems. That belief became part of my selling technique.

Ireland was a boring place for computer sales – especially after Russia, where I had worked mainly in technical computing. I could not see much demand for industrial systems like the HP 1000. So we concentrated on commercial computers: the HP 3000, which was designed for business applications, and low-end HP 250s.

When I looked at the market, I saw that Digital was everywhere. ICL was also strong, but it was a very bureaucratic company with lots of managers. Then there was IBM, which could get very aggressive if its customers switched to other manufacturers.

One day in 1979 a man arrived in Avonbeg and announced that he was our new manager. I do not know where Rod McGahon had worked before. By chance, however, I had recently seen him being interviewed for the job in the Burlington Hotel. Rod did his best at Hewlett-Packard, but he did not last long. You might say that this was down to differences in managerial style. Or that his lifestyle did not fit the HP way.

The first HP 3000 that I sold in Ireland went to the Construction Industry Federation. Consultants had told them that they needed a computer. When the system was delivered, there was no software for it to run. It became clear, indeed, that the lack of applications for our commercial systems was going to be a real problem. The one piece of software that Hewlett-Packard had was MM/3000 – a manufacturing management package that Amdahl implemented at its factory in Swords. I hired Richard Collins to support MM/3000. He came from a manufacturing background and had previously been in Nixdorf UK.

Hewlett-Packard and Cara Consulting announced their partnership in 1980. Seen here (l-r) are Frank Cole (HP), Derek Smorthit (HP), Jennifer Condon (Cara) and Gordon Clarke (Cara).
(Photograph source: Irish Computer October 1980.)

HP did not usually work with resellers, but I needed partners to assist with the supply of software. I signed up Cara, where Gordon Clarke liked Hewlett-Packard’s systems, and CCI, where I convinced the recently appointed managing director to work with us by showing off HP’s latest 400 lines-per-minute printer. CCI became an OEM, agreeing to buy an HP 3000 to run its bureau service along with fifteen HP 250s for resale.

CCI paid for me to go California with its sales manager and accountant. We set up meetings and found good applications for the HP 3000. CCI also sourced accounting and distribution software for the HP 250.

There were often long gaps between receiving the order for a new minicomputer and delivering the system, so I find it difficult to put dates on individual sales. I know that Fisher Body, a General Motors subsidiary that produced seat belts in Belfast, bought an HP 3000 in 1979. Another user, television network operator Dublin Cablesystems, was owned by Canadian company Rogers Cable. Its parent already ran an HP 3000, so the Irish firm was able to obtain software from Canada to manage its customer accounts.

Airmotive Ireland bought an HP 3000 to run software from a company that specialised in packages for the aviation industry. It invited Taoiseach Charles Haughey to perform the official opening. He walked into Airmotive’s computer room, saw the system sitting in its single rack and complained that the HP 3000 was so small. He seemed horrified to find that such a big factory was run by such a little box.

Telecommunication equipment manufacturer Telectron was also a prospective customer, but that sale fell through when the company failed HP’s credit checks. Through Telectron, however, I met Niall MacDermot, who had been responsible for computer selection there. In later years he became head of the MacDermot clan and inherited the title ‘Prince of Coolavin’. Niall, who had studied manufacturing and programming, became my partner in a software product business.

We knew that there were many factories in Ireland that could never afford the MM/3000 package, but might be interested in similar software on the inexpensive microcomputers that were now becoming available. We also found one machine, the Rair Black Box, that had a proper operating system and could support more than a single user.

In 1980 HP Ireland moved to much better premises in Clanwilliam Place. After the other staff had gone home, Niall and I drew up plans there for the new venture, using one of the earliest spreadsheets. Soon we were joined at these evening meetings by Ian McCandless, the service manager at the Irish subsidiary of a company that supplied data entry systems. We registered our software product business as Manufacturing Management Systems (MMS).

I left Hewlett-Packard in June 1980 to run MMS. Shortly before my departure I had to hire someone to sell HP’s technical computers. The strongest candidate, by far, was Elma Carey, an engineering postgrad from Trinity – where students were no longer kept away from the computers. When I informed the management at HP UK, however, I was told in no uncertain terms that I could not appoint a woman. This was not because of company policies or the HP way. It was just inconceivable to the people that I reported to. Fortunately the human resources department intervened, agreed that Elma would be an excellent recruit and she went on to have a distinguished career at Hewlett-Packard.

It took MMS about two years to develop the software product, which we called Microman. Niall MacDermot was the lead author. We sold Altos computers and other hardware to keep the company afloat while the software was being written. Microman did not live up to our high expectations. We learned the hard way that a proper manufacturing management system needs structures and disciplines that did not exist in small factories.

Last edit: May 2017

© Frank Cole 2017