Robert Poynton joined IBM Ireland as a graduate and remained there until his retirement. His twin brother Denis was among his colleagues at the company.
He worked with successive generations of IBM mainframes and mid-range computers, holding a variety of software development, sales and management roles.
Robert died in March 2019.
This testimony begins in the ‘Ireland’s first computers 1956-69’ archive. Click here to view.
In 1969, following the completion of the Aer Lingus project that I had worked on, I gave up my technical career at IBM. I transferred into its sales organisation – seeking to engage Irish businesses in the potential I had witnessed. I needed, however, to turn away from the real-time computing that I had experienced at the airline and to study the old ways of doing things with punched cards and batch processing. I soon learned to see things from the customer’s perspective.
IBM announced the System/3 in 1969, promoting it as suitable for businesses that had not previously thought that they could afford a computer. My brother, Denis Poynton, joined a team of systems engineers that IBM trained in the fundamentals of new machine before the first installations. William Burgess, Michael Donohoe and Noel Peare were also on that team.
The first appearance of System/3 in Ireland was at a big conference in the RDS in late 1970. I remember that its compact size – the fact that it did not require raised flooring or air conditioning – made it appeal to many businesses.
As with its predecessors, System/3 users depended on punched cards to operate the computer. But these were now supplied in a new format. Each card was just one third of the size of the previous standard, but it could hold more characters. It used 96 columns instead of 80, punched with tiny circular holes similar to those in paper tape. The 20 per cent increase in capacity seemed like Valhalla to those of us who had struggled to design applications with only 80 columns!
The new range also offered disk drives in two drawer units. These contained up to four layers of disks – two fixed and two exchangeable – holding a maximum of 10 Mb. Most users, however, still regarded punch cards as their primary form of data storage and many of the early shipments were diskless configurations. It took several years to persuade some customers that they could rely on disks.
In addition to supplying systems, we also signed up customers for the company’s Dublin-based bureau service. Its offerings included a specially modified debtors ledger for insurance brokers. IBM cornered the market for insurance computing by winning the brokers. During the first half of the 1970s we wound down the bureau and encouraged the companies that used it to move to our new mid-range systems.
Insurance Corporation of Ireland, indeed, not only installed a card-based System/3 model 10, but soon added a second one.
System/3 attracted orders from a wide variety of organisations. Cork County Council’s first computer was an entry-level System/3. The Irish Times installed one to manage its advertising sales. UDT Bank chose a System/3 model 15. The head of computing there was Michael Daly, who joined IBM Ireland in 1985 and became its managing director 17 years later.
The mid-range computers also proved successful among Ireland’s building societies, starting with the delivery of System/3s to Educational Building Society and First National Building Society.
Occasionally it made financial sense for a mainframe user to migrate to a smaller, less expensive mid-range computer. Cadbury Ireland, which had installed a System/360 in 1967 scaled down to a System/3 in the following decade. So did Arnotts which switched to a System/3 model 15 in the mid-1970s.
Packaged software was still some years away. IBM expected that System/3 users would run their own data processing departments and we set up training courses for their staff in systems design and RPG programming.
Customers always bought support with the machine and an IBM systems engineer was assigned to each of them. Noel Peare, for example, spent the best part of a year at the Donohoe group of companies in Enniscorthy, whose businesses included agricultural equipment and drinks bottling. This was one of the first System/3 installations, replacing seven NCR accounting machines with a single IBM computer. Noel wrote applications for the System/3 with David Laird, who later set up computer services company Datapac in Enniscorthy.
Other customers hired IT professionals with mainframe experience. Dudley Dolan, for example, was the data processing manager for a System/360 at Cement Limited, then worked on a System/3 at Waterford Glass and later moved to Insurance Corporation of Ireland.
By the middle of the 1970s IBM Ireland’s workforce for mid-range systems had expanded to about 100 people, including service engineers. There was still a demand for bureau services and one of these, Computime, based its operations on a System/3. The company was set up by Kevin Gallagher, who had been a salesman at IBM.
I was also aware of former IBM colleagues who started software businesses, such as Joe Rooney and Declan Ganter at Systems Software and Noel Slattery at Software Development Services.
If the System/3 made it possible for IBM to supply computers to medium size businesses, the System/32 enabled the company to target even smaller organisations. Launched in 1975, this single-user business computer seemed to us to be just a small step up from an accounting machine. IBM began to package basic software applications for sale with the System/32. A multi-user alternative, System/34, followed two years later.
The System/38 was announced in 1978, but the demands of its integrated relational database caused its delivery date to slip until its delivery in the the later part of 1980. Insurance Corporation of Ireland was an early customer, followed by the Irish Civil Service Building Society and the Irish subsidiaries of Brown & Polson, Texaco and Albright & Wilson.
I had very little contact – professional or social – with people from the non-IBM side of the industry. When computer suppliers like Digital Equipment and Nixdorf appeared, our strategy was to encourage customers to maintain centralised control of their systems. I recall, for example, pointing out the potential data communications difficulties when AIB showed an interest in putting PDP-11s into all of its branches.
In 1979 I moved from mid-range systems to mainframes and I stayed with mainframes for the rest of my time in IBM sales.
We launched the IBM 4300 on 23 March 1979 and it dominated my activity for the next few years. The 4300 was not only a step change in terms of power and performance but also facilitated the wider adoption of databases. It enabled smaller companies that had previously used minicomputers to access the System/370 architecture. Some of the building societies that had used System/3s chose this option.
Typically, however, it took customers about two years to get their systems ready for the move to the 4300. John O’Leary at IBM Ireland set up a project office that showed users the steps they needed to go through and produced implementation plans. Many companies changed to the System/38, which also gave them a database, instead of taking the 4300 route.
Having started my career on a systems integration type project at Aer Lingus, I oversaw the sale and implementation of the An Post counter automation and the rollout of point of sale equipment at Dunnes – both seeking to meet real business needs with an effective bundled package of products and support. When we were planing the An Post system, IBM engaged Cara to provide support in all the post offices and I worked again with some of the people that I had known from the Aer Lingus project.
My final four years in IBM were dedicated to the implementation of new online management development modules for IBM’s rapidly growing workforce in Ireland.
I reflect that the 35 years of my career in IBM spanned perhaps the most ‘exciting’ period in the development of information technology. I have always enjoyed the advent of new ways of doing things – new products, new concepts and ideas. Accordingly I feel blessed to have been involved in such a challenging and changing industry throughout my career.
Since I retired in 2002 I have been able to use many of the skills I developed in IBM in the voluntary sector – with some time-out for reflection and meditation on the Camino de Santiago.
Last edit: August 2017
© Robert Poynton 2017