The Aer Lingus systems services division – which later became Cara Data Processing – wanted to hire software developers in May 1970. I was finishing a maths/physics degree at University College Cork and had taken computer studies there as a subsidiary subject. The airline’s bureau, which sold processing services on its IBM mainframes, chose two new recruits from Cork – Ray Guinan and myself. I started working as a programmer at the Aer Lingus headquarters in Dublin airport in late September. At that time, I recall, all the banks were closed by a national strike.
In July 1973 Cara opened a branch office in Cork with Tom Wall as manager. They sent Ray and myself to join him because ‘we spoke de language’. The new office did not have any computer of its own. A Data 100 terminal connected us with the IBM systems at Dublin airport, which held master files for the bureau’s customers on magnetic tape reels.
Cara had acquired another bureau business, ICBS, in November 1972. The Cork customers had been inherited as part of the ICBS acquisition. In the days prior to Cara opening its office the Cork-based customers sent their paper tape input to Dublin via train.
We tried to replicate services that ICBS had offered on its Honeywell system, writing a variety of Cobol-based programs that were suitable for the IBM computers. There was no such thing as packaged software in 1973. The set of programs for one customer was copied from the set for another. We soon found out, moreover, that Cobol on one make of computer could be quite different from Cobol on another.
I remember how, in spring 1973, one of the Cara programming team in Dublin, David Ingoldsby, left the Aer Lingus head office with a Cobol coding pad and said ‘This will come back as a debtors package’. David Ingoldsby was known at the time for his appearances on BBC’s Mastermind programme and the subsequent Irish equivalent presented by Ian Fox. Cara’s management had realised that there had to be a better way than re-inventing the wheel every time a new customer was acquired. David was heading for home so that he could do his creative work uninterrupted by the normal office traffic – a forerunner of what was to come in terms of off-site development!
I don’t believe that anything became of this effort, but it was a precursor to Cara investigating software packages that existed at that time.
The Cara bureau’s main services were statement printing and debtors analysis. The fuel and agri-supplier Sutton’s was our biggest customer in Cork. Printing its statements once a month was a major task. Other ‘inherited’ customers included Cork Harbour Commissioners, paint manufacturer Harrington & Goodlass Wall, engineering firm JB Roche and dairy foods producer James Daly. Over the next couple of years we signed up Murphy’s Brewery, the True Temper factory at Whites Cross, Murphys Evergreen Bacon Company and Three Stripe International among others. We attached a paper tape reader, punched card reader and printer to the local terminal for data input and output.
The first time that I used disks, other than for program storage, was on a job for Mitchelstown Creameries in summer 1976. By this time we had advanced to generating invoices and disk access was required to support pricing. I had no idea how to create or index the files and subsequently do ‘indexed’ reading of the data. The ‘removable’ disk drive that held the company’s pricing files was inside the Aer Lingus complex. Customer and product details etc were still stored on magnetic tape. The only equipment in Mitchelstown was a punch card station for data preparation.
Cara decided to introduce a time sharing service called Caralink, which was headed up by David Little, and chose a minicomputer from BTI Computer Systems as the platform. I moved back to Dublin in November 1977 to support Caralink. I was replaced in the Cork office by Sean Murphy. He went on to set up Core Computer Consultants, which is now a major player in payroll and human resources software.
The BTI machine had a 64K memory and ran BASIC programs. We sourced two applications from the US. A ledger package named ‘Easy’ came from Computer Solutions in Boston. This ‘one-man’ operation was owned by Mitchell Kertzman, who was subsequently to become CEO of database company Sybase and Powersoft, the developer of PowerBuilder. The second application was more of a development utility, but it did have some accompanying ledger packages. When enquiring from the Californian vendor as to the name of the package, the response was ‘Easier’. They were aware that we had already acquired ‘Easy’.
Caralink customers were able to access the computer from their own offices and to submit their data online. In reality the communications speed was abysmal – dial-up access at 30 cps. It was possible to get 120 cps, but this required two dial-up lines – one to send data and a second to receive. A rival bureau service, ICS Computing, had a clear advantage over us because its computer supported asynchronous modems and its customers experienced much faster response times. ICS, which was owned by Ulster Bank and headquartered in Belfast, used a PDP-11 computer.
Denis McMahon, who was head of sales at Cara, contacted me in April 1979. He was planning to set up a new computer services company and had found an investor – Sam Alvis, who had been involved with cargo airline Aer Turas. Frank Waters from ICS and I joined up as co-founders – I invested my pension plan from Aer Lingus – and we took on Tom Costello, who had worked at ICBS, in a technical role. Together we launched Online Computing in June 1979. Denis held more than half the shares in the business.
It was Denis who chose Digital Equipment’s PDP-11 as the computing engine for the new venture. He had previously worked at Baric Computer Services with Derek MacHugh, who had moved to Digital’s sales organisation in Ireland. Digital was very supportive of Online Computing in its early days. We began operations by installing a PDP-11/34 and upgraded to the mid-range PDP-11/44 as soon as it became available.
We sourced applications software from Mini-Computer Business Applications (MCBA) in Los Angeles. Here, again, we were replicating what ICS had done, but we installed a newer release of this software than the version at ICS. MCBA’s product was what people considered to be a package in those days, although its parameterisation was restricted to the company name and whether you were using either a line printer or a character printer. It held data in flat sequential files, which were bereft of indexing capabilities. As a result a lot of the software development effort went into managing the data rather than processing it.
The MCBA software was written in Dibol, which was a Digital simplification of Cobol. Dibol was relevant for the fact that it ran across many of the low-end Digital platforms. Digital launched a series of low-end computers, PDP-11/03 and 11/23 with removable disks, and a low-maintenance operating system RT11. There was even a desktop version, the PDT-11/150, which brought the entry level price for acquiring a computer to an affordable level for small businesses.
The rationale behind Online Computing was to provide a premium service that went beyond what other people were offering. We chose proven hardware and software because these would reduce the risks for customers. Frank Waters, who was not a ‘techie’, also tried to anticipate potential problems with the MCBA software. He brought in control balances that detected procedures that had not been completed correctly. This attention to detail differentiated Online from other bureau operators and, especially, from ICS Computing.
Online was profitable from day one. The business got started quickly because the founders could sign up customers that they knew from their time at other companies. The first timesharing customer was Camac – a sister company to Blackwood Hodge, who were an ICS user at that time. Camac went live on the Online Computing system on 31 August 1979.
The multi-user functionality of RSTS on the PDP-11 made it easy for bureau customers to migrate their operations onto computers of their own. Online soon started to sell PDP-11s as in-house systems. Cork-based Three Stripe International, the distributor of Adidas sportswear in Ireland, which had been a bureau customer of both Cara and ICS, was the first to follow this path. It took delivery of its own PDP-11 in December 1979.
Frank Waters brought in Fast Fit Exhausts, which wanted to introduce bespoke applications for managing inventory and invoicing. Considering the oil and grime that was prevalent in a fitting-shop, this was a ‘hostile’ environment for a computer system. It successfully used the PDT-11/150 with floppy disks, proving that entry level computers could now work in a normal office environment, and beyond, without air conditioning or a clean electricity supply.
The PDP hardware was good for targeting users of accounting systems from vendors such as Olivetti, Burroughs and NCR. These products were used extensively in small businesses at the time. The buy-in from the users was that it would enable them to get rid of their ledger cards – each one had to be individually inserted every time it had to be updated. At month-end every single card had to be entered to generate statements, and again to produce debtors ageing reports.
By 1981 Online Computing was being included in requests for tenders. This was how we won a relatively big order from distribution firm Tennant & Ruttle – a PDP-11/34 with several screens that replaced a Telex System III. This was a company that already employed its own computing staff and had fitted out a computer room. The Tennant & Ruttle decision influenced Robert Roberts, which bought a PDP-11 from us in 1982. Robert Roberts had sales and administration offices, together with a tea and coffee manufacturing operation, in Francis Street and a warehouse located in Tallaght. Its applications required a move from a non-indexed data file structure to a Digital data management system called DMS. This was slow, awkward and restrictive, but it served the customer for several years.
Online Computing continued to focus on the PDP-11 when other Digital partners were promoting the newer and more powerful VAX, which did not have any program size restrictions. The primary reason for this was that the VAX did not support the Dibol programming language in its early days. Digital also offered lower margins to resellers on VAX than it had been offering on the PDP-11 range. One has to remember that this was a time when the bulk of the investment in any new system was expended on the hardware. The lower margin was a disincentive to change while the PDP was still capable of doing many jobs. It also meant that Online was catering for smaller organisations than the enterprises in which Digital was aiming to make direct sales.
John Gray and, later on, Phil Murphy were the key contacts for our company inside Digital Equipment Ireland.
Kevin Haverty, who had worked for Smurfit Computing, joined Online as software development manager in 1982. Kevin brought a very strong management capability to Online, not only managing in-house development, but also in managing customers’ expectations. As a result he quickly became a trusted reference point for many customers.
Online used the subroutines which came with the MCBA software as the foundation for bespoke software development. Later on, when software generating tools were starting to emerge, the company attempted to create its own parameter-based software generator. It would be fair to say that the company was more successful at providing solutions for customers than it was at developing automated software tools! Online split into a development company and a services company in the mid-1980s, when it employed about 35 people.
Mentec acquired Online Computing in 1988. Apart from Denis McMahon, everyone in the company stayed on under the new owner.
The loyalty of Online Computing’s user base was exceptional. In later years Teamsoft, a company that I co-founded in 1995, steered the computing operations of many former Online customers into the 21st century. While the hardware had obviously changed, their core systems were still based on the original Dibol-based software that originated in Online.
Last edit: October 2017
© Ted Murphy 2017