Clothing manufacturer Glen Abbey ran one of the first IBM System/360 installations in Ireland. I joined the company in 1971 as a business systems analyst, following two years at Reed International in London, where I was mainly responsible for the decimalisation of computer business systems. I had started working with computers in 1967, operating an English Electric KDF9 mainframe at the University of Birmingham.
By 1973 Glen Abbey was preparing to upgrade its IBM mainframe to a System/370. I was based in Tallaght and engaged in software conversion for the new computer. The System/370, however, was never implemented. The board of the company decided that a Digital Equipment PDP-11 might be a more cost effective replacement for the older system. Glen Abbey axed the System/370 migration project and I went looking for another job in 1974.
I was not yet familiar with minicomputers at that time. They were still fairly rare and seldom considered as alternatives to hardware like the System/360. Glen Abbey’s decision was therefore unconventional, but the PDP-11 and other minis would soon challenge the dominance of mainframes.
For the next three years I worked on a Burroughs B1700 at Unilever, designing tailored systems for the sale of HB ice cream and Birds Eye frozen foods at the HB premises in Rathfarnham. Burroughs classified the B1700 as a member of its ‘small systems’ family, but in my thinking those machines were always mainframes. Unilever ran a second Burroughs computer that not only served its own subsidiaries but also supported a bureau service for other companies. This practice was still fairly common in mainframe installations.
I entered a different world when I joined Nixdorf in February 1978 as a business support consultant – a world where more organisations ran computers of their own, where the hardware was compact and less expensive and where, instead of the bespoke systems that I had been familiar with, parameterised software could be adapted to suit individual customers.
I first heard of Nixdorf in 1978 through an employment agency. I had never liked the idea of working for a computer manufacturer, but Nixdorf was a fresh operation in comparison with IBM, ICL or Burroughs. In particular I became interested in Comet – Nixdorf’s fully functional set of financial accounting, stock control and order processing applications software. The software looked novel and the Comet concept seemed very different from tailored solutions.
Comet ran on the Nixdorf 8870 minicomputer range, which had just arrived in Ireland. The Irish League of Credit Unions was the first customer to install one. Earlier Nixdorf systems, such as the 820, used magnetic cards from the era of accounting machines. The 8870, based on Data General technologies, was fully electronic.
I joined a small software group at Canada House on Stephens Green, working on Comet implementations for Nixdorf’s Irish customers. I gained my initial knowledge of the software from Alan Nolan, who was the original Comet consultant at Nixdorf Ireland. Bob Lidwell and Dave Taylor had joined the team before me. The group reported to Hilary Doyle, who was software manager. Maurice O’Grady was general manager. The company was small and very flexible, so everyone had access to everyone else.
In general we adapted Comet to each customer’s needs without changing the code. Its uniqueness lay in its controlling parameters. These made the software look dramatically different from one customer to the next. Templates could change the posting screens and printed output. We were able to lay out invoices according to each company’s requirements. Our mantra to the customers was they should not add any tailored code unless they absolutely had to. We also stressed that such additions might pose future difficulties as Comet was upgraded.
The Nixdorf 8870 Model 55. This configuration shows the disk drives on right and drives on the left for streamer mode cassettes, magnetic tapes and 8 inch floppy disks.
(Photograph by Peter Kuley, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Source: Wikimedia Commons)
The first 8870 models were differentiated by their storage capacities and were sometimes referred to as Diablo, Hawk or Phoenix – the original names of the storage components or their manufacturers. Model 10 featured fixed and removable 5 Mb disk cartridges. Model 35 contained a fixed 13 Mb drive. And Model 55 offered two fully removable 33 Mb disks. All the early 8870s needed air conditioning – a requirement that persisted until Nixdorf introduced sealed disk units in or around 1983.
Model 55 proved really successful for Nixdorf. These systems were expensive to buy and expensive to operate, but customers were generally able to run them without employing their own data processing staff. This enabled Nixdorf to sell its employees’ time. Indeed, the company were willing to support all aspects of running the systems. If something went wrong, the customer had just one guy to hit – the Nixdorf manager assigned to that installation.
Garvey’s Cash and Carry in Drogheda and veterinary products supplier Osmonds in Tallaght were early adopters of Comet on the Model 55. I was the designated software consultant – or project manager – for these installations. May Coyle was in charge at Garvey’s. She had long experience of business and computing. Brendan Smith ran the systems at Osmonds. Setting up Comet there was a very big job because the company already held records for more than 30,000 customers on magnetic cards. The Osmond board of directors – Dan and Randal Tierney with Chris Threadgold – was very supportive of the project.
Nixdorf was German but Comet was Dutch. The original developers came from the Netherlands and a Nixdorf office in Utrecht was responsible for product enhancements and support. The people there were like a fount of knowledge for us. The Dutch mentality is very flexible and the Utrecht developers were always prepared to consider the requirements that arose in different countries.
In addition to the core Comet product, they also developed a special version for the motor trade. We introduced this to Ireland in the 1980s. Early customers included Carroll and Kinsella, which set up three sites in Dublin.
The credit union movement also became an important market for the 8870 in Ireland, although it used software that was not based on Comet. Nixdorf Dublin designed and developed a credit union administration package under the guidance of Hilary Doyle and Michael Franklin – with prompting from the Irish League of Credit Unions.
Comet performed best in a specific subset of business computing. We didn’t compete directly against IBM in the late 1970s, largely because IBM users didn’t buy from anyone else. Nor did we come up against Digital, which was still something of an acquired taste with an offering for bigger sites. Our perception was that DEC would have been a competitor of IBM rather than Nixdorf.
On the other hand, we locked horns regularly with Memory Computer, which had jumped into a particular part of the market at around the same time as the 8870 launch. We both went after smaller installations, especially those where order processing and invoicing were computing priorities. Most of these users just wanted to talk about tried and tested stuff rather than look for something too innovative.
In my opinion both Nixdorf and Memory had excellent solutions and winning business was difficult for both. They were the main players in that sector at that time.
When I joined Nixdorf, the Comet team was one of three small software groups in its Dublin office. Robin Buick, Rene Synnott and Joan Bracken – the longer serving staff – worked on applications for the company’s older systems. Another group carried out development projects for customers in financial services. Two of its members, Jim Maher and Michael Franklin, set up life assurance software company FM Systems in later years.
The Comet software group in Dublin expanded gradually, doubling its headcount between 1978 and 1982. Nixdorf also hired ancillary staff to provide user training and to sell computing supplies.
One of our more memorable Comet implementations in the early 1980s involved Sean McDermott Cash and Carry. The company bought a 8870 on the strength of a demonstration, only to find out afterwards that the software could not handle more than 99 items on each invoice. It wanted to record up to 400 items in a single transaction. We adapted Comet to meet this requirement. Brian McNamee, a Nixdorf Ireland developer of applications for the distribution trade, designed a special version and it worked.
Tobacco Distributors in Pearse Street was another notable Comet customer. Most companies entered invoice data onto their Nixdorf 8870s in batches, but this wholesaler wanted to process retailers’ orders at the time that they were placed. We made that possible by designing a data entry routine that reduced the number of keystrokes to a minimum. Brian McNamee wrote the additional software once again.
The customer base for the 8870 and its successor – the Quattro which was introduced in the 1980s – expanded to about 200 sites in Ireland alone, including 20-25 credit unions and 25-30 garages.
In total, Nixdorf claimed around 80,000 Comet implementations, with the largest concentrations in Germany, Holland and France. On a per capita basis we believed that Comet’s penetration in Ireland was relatively high. Companies here were prepared to adapt their procedures to make the parameterised software work. Businesses in some other countries were more determined to do things in their own ways and still demanded tailored code. We noticed that tendency in, for example, the UK.
Looking back we can now see Comet as a transitional product. It demonstrated an alternative to bespoke applications, but was not yet sold off-the-shelf in the way that became commonplace for PC software.
Siemens took over Nixdorf in 1990 and I continued in various roles there until 1999. I left when Siemens stopped supporting Comet, then worked for Vorsprung – a British company that continued to provide services to Comet users in Ireland.
Again and again I saw computer companies achieving success with one generation of products, then losing customers because they did not change quickly enough to new technologies. They always wanted to milk their cow and take the money without reinvesting it. In the 1970s Nixdorf and the other minicomputer manufacturers won business from office equipment firms that were too slow to introduce computers. Then, in the 1980s, they were too slow to respond to the PCs which signalled their decline.
Last edit: August 2017
© Peter Byrne 2017