Sales people from other companies often called into the office where I worked. I was employed by Reckitt’s Ireland in Rathfarnham, aiming for qualification as an associate cost and management accountant. I compared my situation with theirs and was struck by their apparent freedom.
One day David Rossi arrived into the office, trying to sell an Olivetti accounting machine. He was a friend of mine – one I had played rugby against. I envied his neat suit, briefcase in hand and his own car outside. From that moment I wanted to be a salesman like him.
This was in 1967. I did a correspondence course on selling, which I really loved, and two months later spotted an ad in the Irish Times. Bryan S Ryan – the company that supplied Olivetti office equipment – was looking for salesmen, so I immediately applied. Director Ken Ryan and sales manager Maurice O’Grady interviewed me. Afterwards Maurice asked me back. He told me that, while they had filled their quota, he had been very impressed with me and that I should apply again whenever they advertised for staff.
I scanned the papers until, at last, I saw another ad. Ken Ryan offered me a job and I joined Bryan S Ryan in 1968 as an Olivetti accounting machine salesman.
The company had recently moved from Dawson Street to the Merrion Road, where I was mentored and taught the ropes by none other than Dave Rossi. I still owe him a debt of gratitude for teaching me how to sell. Maurice O’Grady, Ray Naughton, Peadar Mulligan, Hilary Doyle, Olaf O’Duill and Alan Cherry were the other salesmen.
Only the really large companies had mainframe computers in those days. Electromechanical accounting machines, which produced printed records of customer transactions, were widely used instead. NCR and Burroughs were Olivetti’s biggest competitors, but we had a technical advantage over them. Currency decimalisation was going to happen in 1971. The rival accounting machines had to be taken away and modified for decimalisation. But Olivetti had models that converted pounds, shillings and pence to pounds and pence by a simple “flick of a switch”.
Some of the more sophisticated accounting machines were able to record invoice details on paper tape. This could then be processed by computer bureau services in order to produce sets of ledgers. During my time at Bryan S Ryan I built up a relationship with Denis McMahon, who worked for the UCC bureau in Shannon. He later became sales manager at the ICBS bureau, which ran a Honeywell mainframe on premises above a supermarket in Churchtown.
Pat O’Donoghue in 1978
(Photo source: Cara News Autumn 1978. Photographer unknown.)
Friden specialised in data preparation equipment that captured information on paper tape that computers could read. The company, which was owned by sewing machine maker Singer, also sold a large range of portable calculators for business users. I moved to Friden in 1971. Donald McDonald was the branch manager, while Kevin Buckley, Brian Pender and Arthur Short worked in sales.
Two years later Denis McMahon approached me about another sales role. Aer Lingus had taken over ICBS to expand its computing services business, which now operated as Cara Data Processing. My function would be to sell Carapay – a bureau payroll service which ran on the Aer Lingus mainframe at Dublin Airport.
I was initially based at a former ICBS office on South Lotts Road, while the Carapay support and installation team – Gerry McGrath, Brian Kirby and Norman Hewson – were all based at the airport. In my first year I sold 24 Carapay packages to organisations large and small, including health boards, Tayto and bread bakeries. The majority used the bureau service to produce weekly, rather than monthly, payrolls.
Maurice Foley was Cara’s managing director when I joined the company in 1973. Denis Hanrahan, Aidan McKenna and Denis Behan followed him in quick succession. Denis McMahon became group sales manager, but he departed from Cara in 1979 to form Online Computing, which launched a bureau service on a Digital PDP-11 in Sandycove.
In 1977 Cara moved into Portobello House, installing the Honeywell mainframe in the basement there. We still used the IBM mainframe at Dublin Airport for Carapay and for general ledger processing. I was promoted to sales manager for all of Cara’s bureau services in the following year.
Cara Data Processing advertisement in Aer Sceala (December 1977)
Friden, meanwhile, had gone through a lot of changes since I left. The company switched its trading name to Singer Business Machines and entered the computer market with the System Ten minicomputer. Then ICL acquired the System Ten business. Friden’s maintenance team founded a new firm to support the customers who used data preparation equipment. This company, Control Systems, was based in Clondalkin, but later moved into Ferry House on Lower Mount Street. Gerry Carmody, Sean Finnerty, Jim Finnerty and Dermot Allen were its directors.
Gerry Carmody contacted me in 1979 after Control Systems had secured distribution rights for Wang products. He asked me to join as sales manager and I left Cara. Wang was setting up a factory in Limerick. We had seen how Digital Equipment had benefitted from having manufacturing operations in Ireland and thought that the new facility might give us an edge over the competition.
Control Systems was the sole distributor in Ireland for all Wang products, but we focused at first on the Wang 2200 minicomputer. Tom Barrett at Barrett Computer Sales supplied accounts management applications that ran on this hardware.
Boart Hardmetals (Europe) in Shannon was the first commercial organisation in Ireland to install a Wang VS computer. Pictured (l-r) with the VS 80 in 1981 are Pat O’Donoghue (Control Systems), Mike Butler (software developer), Mary Woods (Boart), Paul Kearney (Boart) and Noel Shannon (Control Systems).
(Photograph by Dominic Ledwidge O’Reilly, courtesy of Pat O’Donoghue)
Then Wang persuaded us to promote its standalone word processors. Customers in a variety of businesses really took to these single-user systems and we sold many of them. Wang also supplied the Office Information Systems (OIS) series for multi-user word processing with shared printers. We sold a very large OIS to the Industrial Credit Company in Harcourt Street, where Martin Walsh was our contact.
The VS computer – the name referenced “virtual storage” – was the most powerful system that Wang developed. Fred Wang, the company’s head of research and development, considered that its capabilities were comparable with IBM mainframes. When the VS appeared in 1977, though, Wang marketed it as a replacement for minicomputers like the System/32 and System/3. According to the company, it was easy for users to migrate applications written in the RPG II language from these IBM platforms to the VS.
I sold the first Wang VS in Ireland to Bord na gCapall, where it replaced an IBM System/32. We then secured a massive order for two VS systems with the Land Registry and the Dublin Metropolitan Courts.
My personal view, however, was that Wang made a mistake in introducing the VS. It not only placed the company in competition with IBM, but also with Digital Equipment, which was very strong in Ireland. I did not believe that Wang, whose strength was in word processing, was geared up to compete at that level.
By 1982 there were about a dozen employees at Control Systems, including systems manager David Williams, software specialist Hamilton Elliott and Noel Shannon in sales. I had asked the directors to allow Wang to take over the company, but found them reluctant to consider this option. The situation changed, however, after Gerry Carmody died in a car crash. The other directors decided to sell the business and Wang Ireland was born in October 1982. Ken Bond became the manager of the new company.
I stayed for about six months after the takeover. My next move was to Telephone Cost Control and in 1985 I joined Sound Systems as sales manager.
Last edit: August 2017
© Pat O’Donoghue 2017