Anna Browne

I was born in Chicago to Irish parents. Both were from deeply rural backgrounds; in their own ways they’d adapted to life in the US and thrived there, but as is often the case, wanted to return ‘home’ to raise a family. We moved to Ireland when I was five – my first major culture shock! My mother, ever the negotiator, argued the case for finding a middle ground between their original home-places – Mam was from Donegal, Dad was from Kildare – so a farm in Mullingar was an obvious choice.

My earliest experiences of life in Ireland were decidedly low-tech! We were mostly self-sufficient, my parents worked long hours outside all day and news of the outside world came from ‘the wireless’ we didn’t have a TV until the late 1970s. I spent a lot of time outside in nature.

I successfully avoided my teachers’ advice to get a ‘good job in a bank’ (because that’s what girls who were good at maths did while they were waiting for a husband, obviously!) and, with my parents support, I took a general science degree course at University College Dublin. I fell in love with computer science.

If I had to name one key person from that time in UCD, it would be Joe Morris. This was the early 1980s; the idea of the ‘home computer’ was just gathering momentum. Some students would have had access to such advanced marvels as the Commodore Vic-20, the Sinclair ZX-80 or 81, or if they had really rich parents, an Apple II or an IBM PC. Joe, however, made it clear that in his course, the playing field would be levelled; having access to a home computer would, in fact, be a disadvantage. We worked on paper to force us to focus on the algorithm, rather than ‘hacking’ a solution on a computer. In my opinion, this made us better programmers. The aforementioned ‘home computer revolution’ has also been identified as a major factor in driving girls and women away from careers in tech – at the time I started in UCD, the gender balance in the industry was about 66% male, 33% female. Those numbers drastically dis-improved over the following decades, so I’m glad I met Joe when I did.

On graduating in 1984, many of us left the country. There were jobs available in Ireland at the time, mostly in insurance companies or the civil service; some of my peers went to work for CPT or Compucorp in Cork. ‘The Valley’ in the US, though, presented lots of interesting opportunities, so off I went to Los Angeles with Compucorp. Shortly thereafter I relocated to the Bay Area to work with WordTech Systems.

PC software packages had taken off in 1984, even though users were still relying on desktop computers with two floppy disk drives. Developers like WordTech Systems were inventing new ways of doing things. WordTech was a young company that produced database software. The dBase package produced by Ashton-Tate was popular, but because it was an interpreted product, anyone using a product developed for dBase had to buy a dBase package also. WordTech’s innovation was to create a compiler, so that dBase developers could create an executable that they could sell.

I worked there for about eight years, and we released dBXL and Quicksilver, which ran on MS-DOS. I also worked on Arago, a dBase IV workalike (with compiler), but left the company before it shipped.

WordTech’s founders were educated in UC Berkeley. I mostly worked with Randy Solton – a very smart man with very high standards! He was the company’s database guy while I worked on the user interface, programming in the C and C++ languages. We had other developers and a strong quality assurance (QA) department, and had great processes in place that supported our collaboration.

I was involved in localisation in WordTech at the source level – I wasn’t working on translating or shipping localised products. We did deals with our distributors to organise translations into languages other than English. If a distributor commissioned a localised product, we would build one and they would test it.

I came back to Ireland in 1992. Symantec’s software development group in Blanchardstown recruited me that autumn. It shared a premises with the Symantec manufacturing organisation, but there wasn’t much interaction between our group and the production people. Localisation was our priority. Symantec hired me as someone with technical abilities; I had worked as a developer on commercial products, and I also had experience with Japanese double-byte localisation. In hindsight I realise how rare I was at the time, as a programmer who could solve technical problems in localisation.

The cultural norms in a small startup, where everyone has grown up together, are different from those in a large organisation. Symantec was a big corporation and, when I joined, I had to learn to be more ‘political’. In such an environment, the ‘optics’ were as important as the result.

My background was quite unlike the other people in the Symantec software group. The managers had come out of Lotus Development and wanted to reproduce the localisation processes there. Whatever Lotus was doing, we did something similar. Many of the other software staff were straight out of college.

After I joined Symantec, I was initially helping with fixing bugs created during translation, but then moved onto creating some tools to streamline the localisation process.

Microsoft Windows 3.1 was the target platform for Symantec’s products from 1992 to 1995. The shipped software product for Windows 3.1 was an executable and associated DLLs – these would be shipped on floppy disks or CDs and then installed onto the purchaser’s computer.

Anna at her desk in Symantec in 1996.
(Photographer unknown. Photograph courtesy of Anna Browne)

I developed a translation tool, named ‘Pebbles’ after the Flintstones character. It provided a safe way to go into the library and to edit the strings inside it so that they supported languages other than English. Previously localisation engineers worked on the source code – RC files – and the product would need to be built. This could be time consuming and error prone.

Subsequently I created ‘Utah’ which did an automatic translation. It used a previous US version and a matching language version to make a database of language pairs. It then applied these to a new US version, thus creating a partially translated version, and saving huge amounts of engineering time and translation time. These tools allowed Symantec to achieve SimShip – simultaneous shipping of the language version of software with the US version. It was, of course, a team effort with the documentation team, who had similar challenges with the documentation (which had to be printed) and help systems.

I had to ‘break’ the new file format for Windows 95 when it arrived, so that I could update Pebbles and Utah to work with it. There was no documentation, so it was challenging. I spent a lot of time reading Hex, and I did eventually crack it. The discipline that that I had learned from Joe Morris in UCD, and my years of experience in WordTech systems all stood to me!

Microsoft released its own API for translation later on, so anyone could create these kinds of tools easily.

Symantec subsequently promoted me to tools development manager. In this role I also assumed responsibility for running Symantec’s release lab. Its job was to recreate the software build environment so that we could produce localised applications. That group also handled IT for the localisation side of Symantec, and we needed to be very nimble in a way that the manufacturing side of the house did not. The IT operations team was very experienced, so I had little involvement in its day-to-day challenges. My team also created the first company intranet.

Symantec sent me to a lot of localisation conferences around Europe and I got to know everyone in the business. I also joined SLIG sub-committees that dealt with tools and processes, although I remember that a lot of the talk about standards and certification didn’t really lead anywhere.

The Symantec team that worked on Norton Commander mark the launch of the product in 1996.
Back row (l-r): Damian Scattergood, Derek Lyons, unknown, Martin Bergman, Anna Brady, Tony O’Dowd and John Rowley.
Front row (l-r): Derek White, Tony Troy, Marie Kenny and Paul Canavan.
(Photographer unknown. Photograph courtesy of Anna Browne)

By 1995 we were concerned about a shortage of skills across the industry. I made contact with the FÁS office in Cabra to talk about a collaboration what would train localisation QA engineers. Other localisation companies joined in and together we set up a course on quality assurance for software localisation. We tailored it to suit non-graduates. FÁS had a tutor who was free and we helped him to develop a course and supplied him with translated software that the students could use. Unemployed people signed up for this six month course, got work experience and many went on to good jobs.

Following on from the success of the FÁS course, the NSD invited me to join its third level forum committee. I recall working with Seamus Gallen from the NSD to find ways to encourage more young women to choose computer science as a career.

During my time in Symantec I also worked briefly on a release of Norton Commander – this was a product that sold sufficiently well in Germany that it made sense to set up a team in Dublin to further develop. I was involved with this team as we neared the ship date.

Our software translation tools were up and running and achieving ‘SimShip’ for the software was in hand. We were spending more time on documentation and help systems. Fred Hollywood did a lot of work with Sharon O’Brien in Dublin City University on machine translation in these areas.

On the wider localisation scene I was also impressed by the work of Robert Barany at International Translation & Publishing in Bray and consultant Sarah Carroll. In 1996-97 they invented the S-Tagger translation software for documentation in FrameMaker files. The product became an industry standard in localisation services.

As the tools matured my work at Symantec was more about managing people, and making sure that processes were created and followed. I also worked with universities – in particular UL – to arrange placements for students. Many of those students returned to Symantec on graduation.

Most people who moved up the ladder further in Symantec at that time found opportunities in the US, but that wasn’t something that particularly interested me. So when I was laid off in 1998 it wasn’t a huge surprise, and I wasn’t upset.

I took some time out to go travelling and on my return, I worked remotely as a programmer, fixing bugs in dBase for Alan Katz – the latest owner of the database software. He bought the product in March 1999 and was trading as dBase Inc.

I had got to know VistaTEC through people – mostly Phil Ritchie – that I met at localisation conferences and industry associations. Mervyn Dyke founded the company in Dublin in 1997 and grew it by opening satellite offices in Boston, San Jose and Washington DC. It offered localisation outsourcing services to software publishers. Computer Associates and Oracle were major customers.

The senior management at VistaTEC included project manager Pat Kelly and Phil Ritchie, who was in charge of documentation and tools. Tom Murray was the finance director and later on became the CEO.

I joined them in November 2000 as engineering services manager. My role was focussed on processes, people management and profitability. I developed some tracking tools that helped up to measure that, which were used for some time subsequently. At that time I had quite a large team, and that team grew (and shrunk) with the ‘tidal shifts’ of the industry.

The next logical step was to outsource localisation engineering and QA, and we achieved our aims during my tenure, identifying and developing partners in Eastern Europe initially. We might do one language in-house and then outsource the rest. So our team was reduced in size, but we were still able to scale to meet changing client needs.

In 2005 my role changed to tools and process manager. I worked part time, remaining with the company until 2009. My number two, Yvonne McNamara, who had joined Vistatec right at the outset, took over the engineering services role.

I’m writing this in 2023, and at this point I have moved away from technology work. With the climate crisis, it seems better to concentrate my energy on helping people to live more sustainable lives. Things have come full circle – I’m back in Mullingar. I do have a TV these days but rarely have time to watch it!

Last edit: February 2024

© Anna Browne 2023-2024