Web pioneers 1992-99

April

Ireland arrived on the web when a Sun SparcStation IPX at University College Cork (UCC) became the first World Wide Web server in Ireland – and only the ninth in the world.

This early implementation of web technology was achieved by Peter Flynn at the UCC computer centre, who represented HEAnet on RARE working group 3. Tim Berners-Lee from CERN was also a member of this group, which was responsible for user support, information services and directories. In the autumn of 1991 he demonstrated HTML to his colleagues at a WG3 meeting in Zurich.

The World Wide Web had recently made its debut as a publicly available service on the internet. In August 1991 Berners-Lee published a summary report on the CERN project that had created the first web browser, produced the first web pages and turned a NeXT computer into the first web server.

Peter Flynn saw a potential use for these technologies on the Curia project for which he was an IT adviser. Curia had recently started to assemble a research database of text from early Irish language manuscripts for storage on a Sun workstation. He downloaded the web software from CERN and, in consultation with Tim Berners-Lee, compiled it for the SparcStation IPX.

By now CERN had created the world’s first home page, which contained a list of operational web servers. It added curia.ucc.ie to this list in April 1992. In the following months Curia’s researchers uploaded the first whole document – the Aisling Oenguso – to their database.

Read Peter Flynn’s testimony

June

The US National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which was based at the University of Illinois, released its NCSA Mosaic web browser. Marc Andreesen led the development team.

July

Justin Mason at object-oriented software company Iona Technologies set up a web server with a page of information on Iona and its Orbix middleware at www.iona.ie. This was the 70th HTTP server in the world and the first non-academic web server in Ireland.

Iona, which was based at Trinity College Dublin, had launched Orbix in mid-June at the Object World trade show in San Francisco. It promoted the product as the first full and complete implementation of the Object Management Group’s Common Object Request Broker Architecture for C++ programmers. The company soon began to use its web presence as a marketing resource for Orbix, becoming one of the first organisations anywhere to grasp the commercial potential of the new medium.

Read Justin Mason’s testimony

July

IEunet, the Trinity College-based internet service provider, launched its own web server at granuaile.ieunet.ie. The hardware was a diskless Sun SparcStation ELC with a string of SCSI disks attached.

The company established its web presence through a collaborative effort. IEunet founders Cormac Callanan and Michael Nowlan and postgraduate students David Broderick and Darragh O’Grady shared the credit.

There were initially two pages on the web site. One had a link to the EUnet network services organisation in the Netherlands and the second page contained contact details for IEunet itself.

July

James Casey created www.maths.tcd.ie for the Trinity College Dublin mathematics department, following suggestions from Justin Mason.

The TCD computer science department appeared on the web shortly afterwards. By November, indeed, it had set up one site for the distributed systems group – the postgraduate research unit where Iona Technologies originated – and another for the student computer research group which catered for undergraduates.

Paddy Waldron set up another Trinity web server at pwaldron.bess.tcd.ie on 29 November 1993. ‘Bess’ referred to business, economics and social studies.

Liam Relihan, who was studying for a masters degree in computer science at the University of Limerick, established the itdsrv1.ul.ie web server on a Sun workstation.

He wrote the initial code for the site in C and later installed some open source software. By November he had added a gallery of still images from The Prisoner television series to the server.

October

Postgrad student David Broderick formed a business, WebNet Technologies, which aimed to lead Irish companies onto the web. He was joined by Darragh O’Grady and Paul Hammond who were also MSc students at TCD. IEunet offered to assist them with a free hosting service.

The three partners attracted some interest from commercial organisations over the following year but, for most businesses, it was too early to invest in a web presence.  Internet adoption was not yet wide enough to support WebNet’s ambitions.

November

Internet service provider Ireland On-Line announced plans to distribute the Global Network Navigator (GNN) in Ireland. GNN, produced by O’Reilly & Associates in the US, was the first commercial web publication.

As part of this initiative, Ireland On-Line set up its own web site at www.iol.ie and, to get things started, displayed the GNN home page there. From 1994 onwards the company sold pages in this domain to customer organisations, giving them a first experience of publishing web content.

Read Deirdre O’Byrne’s testimony

The Interactive Systems Centre (ISC), a multidisciplinary research unit at the University of Ulster’s Magee campus in Derry, launched a web site on its server in late 1993.

Mike McCool led this project with support from the research centre’s own graphic design and product design group. Each of the ISC’s 35 or so staff was then invited to create a personal home page on the site.

The ISC server was up and running almost two years before the University of Ulster Computer Centre established a more official web presence for the university.

December

Broadcom Éireann Research, a Dublin company that undertook research and development for the telecommunications industry and network operators, established a web site. One of its researchers, Karl Jeacle, set up the server on his own initiative, mainly because he was interested in Unix and networking.

Broadcom positioned itself at the intersection of network engineering and computer system design. It started life in 1987 as Ireland’s vehicle for participation in the European Commission’s RACE programme for telecommunications research. Originally structured a joint venture between Telecom Eireann, LM Ericsson and Trinity College Dublin, it had moved to premises outside the university by 1993, but retained close links with Trinity and collaborated on projects with Iona Technologies.

Early versions of the web site contained information on EU projects that Broadcom was involved in, the work it was doing with its parent organisations and profiles of the people who worked at the company.

March

A group of Irish expatriates began to distribute small snippets from RTE radio broadcasts via FTP servers and web servers around the world. Their service, RTE To Everywhere, forwarded extracts from news bulletins in English and in Irish. It ran until October 1988.

This project demonstrated the potential to share sound clips across the web long before anyone thought about streaming audio (or video) on the internet.

The founders of RTE To Everywhere were Liam Relihan at the University of Limerick, who recorded RTE radio news reports automatically from a radio connected to his Sun workstation, and Pat Murphy at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in the US, who uploaded the audio files to an FTP server. Colleagues in California, Australia, Britain and Scandinavia subsequently set up mirror sites.

By August 1994 the service was recording and forwarding five to seven minutes of news each day from the Morning Ireland programme and another three minutes of nuacht in the Irish language. In the early stages the project team used the .au audio file format from Sun Microsystems, but later switched to RealAudio.

April

Jim Clark, who had previously founded Silicon Graphics, and Marc Andreessen, who had worked on web browser technology at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, set up Mosaic Communications Corporation.

The company changed its name to Netscape Communications in November 1994.

May

Armagh Observatory launched a web site to disseminate information about its astronomical research. Under a new director, Mark Bailey, its work at the time included projects on stellar astrophysics and on the interrelationship between comets and asteroids.

Two staff members led the web initiative. Geoff Coxhead was an electronics engineer while Martin Murphy managed Armagh’s Starlink node – a resource for data sharing among UK astronomical research communities.

PhD students attached to the observatory were also keen to work with internet technologies and produced much of the material on the site.

June

The National Institute for Management Technology (NIMT), a research and technology transfer organisation established in 1991 under the government’s software programme in advanced technology, made its World Wide Web debut at www.nimt.rtc-cork.ie. Ronan O’Mahony was responsible for setting up the NIMT’s IT systems and created the web site on a Windows NT server.

The NIMT had recently changed its name from the Executive Systems Research Centre. In 1994 it established a new formal affiliation with Cork Regional Technical College and moved into new premises at North Mall. The web site presented its revised profile as well as listing its services for software companies and general business.

Windows NT servers on the web were subject to attacks that usually brought them down just hours after connection. The NIMT protected its system from this vulnerability by installing a special patch that had the desired effect.

Ireland On-Line developed a web site for Kennys Bookshop in Galway, which claimed to be just the second bookstore in the world to have this new type of online shopfront.

The web server populated pages on the site with titles from the Kennys catalogue. The system collected orders on online forms, then emailed the details to the shop.

October

Tim Berners-Lee in CERN and Michael Dertouzos at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

W3C produced technical recommendations for web standards and developed policies and practices for web accessibility, internationalisation and intellectual property rights.

Clerys department store in Dublin experimented with a web version of its mail order catalogue, utilising technical advice from WebNet Technologies.

The company wanted to create an online catalogue that would generate sales by telephone or letter post and was pleasantly surprised when it attracted email correspondence. But the project fizzled out because of the effort that would have been required to put information online.

December

Ronan O’Boyle, who was working on a demonstration project for advanced communications from the European Commission’s RACE research programme, and John McHugh, who had a background in accountancy, set up W3 Services. Initially based at the University of Limerick. the company aimed to raise awareness of the internet, to design web sites and to offer consultancy and training services.

Internet connectivity had recently become available in the midwest. Shannon Internet Services, which was part-owned by Shannon Development, established a regional internet node in summer 1994.

Read Ronan O’Boyle’s testimony

December

Netscape Communications released version 1.0 of its Navigator browser, providing a common feature set and graphical user interface for the Microsoft Windows, Macintosh and X Window System operating environments.

The company’s ambitions stretched far beyond its initial product. In March 1995 Netscape announced a broad portfolio of server software, internet applications and security options that enabled information exchange and electronic commerce, not only on the internet but also across corporate IP networks.

January

Simon Walsh and Eamon O’Hoisin launched Webfactory, a web consultancy and design firm that positioned itself as more of a marketing agency than a technology supplier. In its first year the Dublin company landed development contracts from Guinness, Kindle Banking Systems and the Commonwealth Office in London.

February

Clontarf-based firm Internet Business Ireland introduced consultancy, design and HTML programming services so that Irish companies and products could seek international customers through the World Wide Web.

One of its first projects allowed internet users in North America and Europe to order shamrock for delivery on St Patrick’s Day. Another enabled the Phoenix Park Woodland Conservation Project to launch launched an international appeal for funds to plant new trees in the Dublin park. It promised that donors would receive an official certificate signed by the city’s lord mayor.

Fred Crowe, the founder of Internet Business Ireland, had previously sold personal computers and applications software. His new venture was affiliated with internet service provider Ireland On-Line and provided its clients with pages in the www.iol.ie domain.

February

Accountancy firm Chapman Flood posted its analysis of the government’s taxation policy on the World Wide Web just hours after minister for finance Ruairi Quinn delivered the annual budget statement in the Dáil.

Internet service provider IEunet provided technical assistance for this exercise.

February

A government announcement was sighted on the World Wide Web for the first time, courtesy of Dublin City University, on 23 February 1995. DCU staff uploaded a joint framework document on Northern Ireland to a web server in the computer applications department on the day after its release by the Irish and British governments.

The project was initiated by DCU president Danny O’Hare, who met foreign affairs minister Dick Spring on the evening of the announcement and suggested that the web would be a good distribution channel for the framework document. This was the first time that any Irish government department had disseminated an official document through the web.

The episode highlighted the absence of web resources inside the civil service, where the Department of Finance discouraged any internet use.

March

The economic research unit at Bank of Ireland set up experimental web pages in collaboration with IEunet. The official launch of its site, offering a daily commentary on the financial markets and other reports, followed in July.

By then AIB’s corporate and commercial treasury unit had introduced a similar service with support from Ireland On-Line.

In both cases it was striking that the banks’ treasury divisions led the way online for their parent organisations. And that both sought assistance from their internet service providers to publish financial information that they already disseminated by letter post and fax.

April

The Irish Times opened its own web site at irish-times.ie. The newspaper had started publishing sample information on the IEunet web server in the previous year and migrated this content to its new address. It claimed to be among the first 30 newspapers in the world with a web presence.

May

Sun Microsystems announced the Java object-oriented programming language, describing it as the first language for developers of publishing and interactive multimedia applications for the internet. Java was created through internal research and development at Sun.

This launch event also introduced the HotJava browser, which was based on the Java language, new internet security tools and the Netra Internet Server with enhanced web publishing capabilities.

Sun released Java 1.0 as a free web download in January 1996. It also formed the Javasoft business unit to manage the new technology.

International Thomson Computer Press published ‘The World Wide Web Handbook: A Guide for Users, Authors, and Publishers’ by Peter Flynn from University College Cork.

Read Peter Flynn’s testimony

May

The Higher Education Authority awarded a contract to the Business and Technology Information Service at the University of Limerick to manage the contents of a web-based ‘national information server’. This would serve as a first point of reference for anyone looking for information about Ireland, including government records and national statistics. HEAnet would handle the networking requirements. The project proved to be too ambitious and failed to take off.

Read Martina Flynn’s testimony

June

Aer Lingus introduced an information service on the World Wide Web that was built and operated by IBM’s internet applications business unit. A web server at IBM’s premises in Hursley, England hosted the airline’s first web pages.

July

ICL’s Information Technology Centre in Leopardstown demonstrated new ‘global electronic media services’ software that controlled access to information on the World Wide Web. This technology encrypted the location codes that identified web pages, so that they could only be reached by authenticated, logged-in users. The software also incorporated billing mechanisms.

The ITC had developed the core technologies for this demonstration. ICL’s multimedia group was responsible for selling it. The company reported that most of the early interest had come from technical and academic publishers.

July

Kerna Communications set out to market the web skills in the computing services organisation at University College Dublin, especially its expertise in interactive web services that used object-oriented database technology. The new venture, which was led by Alan Byrne, also offered training and consultancy in internet publishing and security.

One of Kerna’s first initiatives was the Swiftguide to Ireland, a directory of Irish web sites.

August

W3 Services launched Commerce Ireland, a web-based directory of companies, products and services. The first version was a regional guide, featuring some 850 organisations supported by Shannon Development. Users could search the listings with a set of keywords and the featured businesses were able to edit their own information.

Commerce Ireland expanded into a national service in early 1996 when it added companies from the Forbairt database. At its peak the service covered 14,000 firms.

August

Microsoft introduced the Internet Explorer browser

This software was designed specifically for the company’s new Windows 95 operating system, which it released on the same day.

September

Karl Jeacle developed a web-based calculator as a way to teach himself Java programming and soon attracted attention far beyond Ireland.

This Java applet calculated the monthly payments due on a mortgage and graphed the profile of the loan throughout its lifetime. It featured sliders for making alterations to the principal, interest or duration of the mortgage and displayed the effects of these changes dynamically.

A first edition for the HotJava browser went online in September 1995. Early search engines ranked the calculator highly and Sun showed it in some of its presentations on Java to financial institutions. The original English language version was followed by translations into sixteen other languages.

Initially hosted on the Broadcom web server because he worked at the company, Karl Jeacle moved the calculator onto his personal site in 1996. He created Android and iOS versions in 2009 and 2015 and rewrote the web code in Javascript in 2013.

September

Kinsale became the first place in Ireland to provide local tourist information on the web.

Imogen Bertin, who created the www.kinsale.ie site, had studied HTML on a University College Cork course delivered by web pioneer Peter Flynn.

September

A team from UCD computer science department founded a new company, Web Educational Support Tools (WEST) with Dennis Jennings as chairman.

This group had developed software that delivered multimedia training material over the web. It created WEST after this application won first place in its category at the Apple Enterprise Awards in New York.

In early 1996 WEST changed its name to WBT Systems and retitled its delivery and administration system for educational courses as TopClass.

Read Henry McLoughlin’s testimony

MicroMedia, a Tallaght-based supplier of print media services to Irish industry, launched a new business, The Irish Trade Web (ITW), to support online publishers. Its services included web page design, consulting and content hosting. ITW’s own site was linked to a database of information on Ireland’s top 1,000 companies.

Tom Skinner founded Dublin-based Parallel Design & Development, later known as Parallel Internet and Parallel IT, offering a combination of web consultancy and graphic design expertise.

One of its most prominent initiatives was Software AtoZ, a web-based industry directory. By the end of the decade this evolved into the Softwareireland.com portal with an online purchasing facility, a tenders-wanted section, recruitment listings, a directory of internet resources and a searchable database of software development companies.

December

Clonakilty-based Trade Pages launched a worldwide e-commerce system on the web, combining a database of products and spare parts with order-placing features. UCC’s Peter Flynn was a technical consultant on this project.

Initially designed to sell billiards tables and related products, the company positioned its service as an ‘on-line internet trade fair’ for sellers of other goods and offered a separate home page and order form for each vendor on the system.

According to founder Paul Russell, Trade Pages was the first operational e-commerce system in Ireland, but the concept met with opposition from the state agencies that could have assisted it.

December

Digital Equipment released the beta edition of its AltaVista web search and indexing software. The service rapidly attracted attention and established the conventions for web searching.

Among the groups that built on AltaVista’s foundations were Stanford University researchers Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Scott Hassan, who developed the first version of their Google search engine in 1996.

December

IT Design added a web client option to its Viper information retrieval system.

The Dublin-based software developer had released Viper two years earlier as a fast factfinding utility for workgroup servers, then scaled it up to run on large private networks. By 1995 the software had found its niche as an application for managing corporate phone directories and organisation charts.

The initial form of web access involved routing queries from a browser via a web server to the computer that held the requested data. The company subsequently developed an applet for Netscape Navigator that could invoke Viper from the client machine and thus accelerate the response time.

19 December

The Office of the Revenue Commissioners launched a tax and customs information site at www.revenue.ie.

According to an official announcement, the contents of this web site included key points on personal tax rates, incentives for investors, how to pay vehicle registration tax and a charter of rights for taxpayers.

22 January

Iona Technologies announced plans to add support for Sun’s new Java language to Orbix, its Corba-based software integration toolset. This initiative aimed to extend the object technology paradigm to the World Wide Web, enabling developers to create client-server applications that users could access through a web site.

Sun had invested in Iona two years earlier and its SunSoft subsidiary was a minority shareholder in the Dublin company.

Iona released this Java-Corba combination, which it named OrbixWeb, in May.

05 February

The Centre for Management Organisation and Development at the Department of Finance issued a request for tenders for the provision of structures, design and standards for government pages on the World Wide Web. It asked for submissions by the end of the following week.

More than 20 contenders submitted proposals and Ireland On-Line was the successful bidder. The company delivered site design and development services and an official government web site went live on 16 May.

March

Ireland On-Line launched an option for business users of its internet access service to obtain an entry-level web presence free of charge. By filling in a prepared form, these customers could generate the HTML code for a basic three-page web site, including company logos and other graphics.

Other internet service providers moved fast to match or improve on this offer. For example Medianet, which was owned by an advertising agency, introduced free content hosting for all the customers on its Club Internet service.

May

RTE delivered its first live video broadcast over the web: an edition of the Late Late Show. By the end of 1996 it had run about two dozen such broadcasts, using the Streamworks server software from Xing Technologies. It also streamed live audio on the web for selected events.

May

The Electronic Document Interchange (EDI) Association of Ireland changed its name to the Electronic Commerce Association of Ireland (ECAI).

The change reflected the decline of EDI schemes that supported closed groups of trading partners. Those services had been overtaken by the growing use of email in business transactions and by the emergence of the web as an open platform for commercial sales.

Unlike its predecessor. which was essentially a forum for IT professionals, the ECAI set out to recruit members in marketing roles. The association remained active until 2001, when it was absorbed into the Irish Internet Association.

The Bank of Ireland pub in San Francisco, which had registered the bankofireland.com domain name, agreed to transfer its internet identity to the Dublin-based financial services group of the same name.

August

GFT Software opened a Java competency centre in Dublin to provide custom applications development for corporate customers, particularly IT firms and financial service companies. GFT had grown out of an IT research institute at the University of Furtwangen and the Dublin operation was its first development facility outside Germany.

GFT, in partnership with Sun Microsystems and its distributor Horizon Open Systems, became a prominent evangelist for the web-oriented programming language in the Irish software industry.

29 August

CSK Quay Financial Software launched Slingshot, describing it as the first system specifically designed for distributing real-time market data over the internet.

Based in Dublin and originally known as Dealformatics, Quay Financial Software had been formed in 1985 and achieved international success with an information delivery and presentation system for financial dealing rooms. Tokyo-based CSK Corporation acquired the company in 1995.

Ulster Bank Markets was an early adopter of Slingshot, using the software to publish real-time foreign exchange rates on its web site. According to the developer, the new system was fully integrated with standard web pages and could be accessed from any browser with an appropriate extension.

November

Trintech Group and Microsoft announced an agreement to integrate Trintech’s payment processing software with Microsoft Merchant Server. This combination supported the authorisation and management of purchases through the internet.

Bank of Ireland became the first financial institution to implement Trintech’s web commerce technology. It implemented Trintech’s PayWare software for retailers and PayGate for banks in its ShopIreland ‘web mail’ for department stores and giftware outlets.

December

The ICL Information Technology Centre in Leopardstown signalled that one of its customers would test a banking service over the World Wide Web during the first half of 1997. The development centre’s Information Broker framework, which was based on Java, added security functions and customer information recording features to a web server. ICL hoped that these capabilities would overcome banks’ reservations about entrusting money transfers and other transactions to the web.

December

Web consulting and site design firm Nua teamed with Telecom Internet in an initiative to create a web presence for every settlement in Ireland. They described their Local Ireland project as a national framework for supporting community-oriented web content. Its underlying philosophy was to enable each locality to present its culture and talents to a global audience.

It started with a Local Longford event in Granard. Partnerships in Cavan, Longford and Kerry uploaded information about their counties to Local Ireland in the months that followed.

In January 1997 Nua launched its Nua Internet Surveys publication – an Irish-produced digest of international research and commentaries on internet use around the world.

January

Trinity Group, the operator of the Team 400 messaging service, acquired a majority stake in Solutions Group, a web development and design company founded by Norman Crowley, Mark Russell and Brian Bardin.

Team 400 had recently diversified into web content development and had outsourced some of this work to Solutions Group. Its parent organisation now proceeded to expand its activities in this area.

The combination with Solutions Group resulted in a new company that subsequently traded as Trinity Commerce.

January

Bank of Ireland became the first bank in the country to provide secure online banking to personal customers. At the start of 1997 it announced its intention to hold a three month pilot trial of a service that enabled users to view the status of their accounts and transactions through a web browser. Testing continued into the summer months and the web service quietly became a permanent offering. From September 1997 onwards it was available to any account holder with internet access.

Specialists from Digital Equipment, Netscape Communications and Vision helped to establish the online service by enhancing the messaging middleware on the bank’s corporate network and introducing new firewalls and encryption measures.

Read Online banking – Ready if you want it

March

Dell Computer Corporation launched its first web-based sales quotation service for Irish customers. Only a small selection of bundles based on its desktop PCs were initially offered through this channel.

In the US, where Dell had introduced online ordering in 1995, it was now generating revenues of over $1 million a day from sales on the internet.

March

Siemens launched TrustedWeb, an access rights management system for web servers. The software had originated in an EU research project and was developed at Software and Systems Engineering (SSE), a Siemens subsidiary in Dublin.

Seven months later SSE released a companion product, TrustedMime, which applied 128-bit encryption to confidential email messages.

March

Baltimore Technologies launched the J/Crypto cryptographic toolkit for Java programmers. The Dublin software company claimed to be the first to market with encryption tools for the development of Java applets.

In October shipped its flagship product, the UniCert Certification Authority, which employed public key cryptography to authenticate web users. UniCert provided a security framework for services like internet shopping, web banking and online trading.

March

Start-up Lionet Technologies made its public debut at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco, styling itself as ‘The Dublin Java House’. Its first products were Predator, a web advertising tool, and ViewPort, a pay-per-view or pay-per-print HTML document viewer.

April

Assurelink, a consortium of nine life assurance companies, appointed ICL Ireland to be the systems integrator for a national web-based service for insurance brokers.

Each participating insurance firm would install a Sun Netra server running an Oracle database and Netscape Enterprise Server. The brokers would be able to access these systems from a standard browser, connecting through a central Assurelink hub for authentication purposes.

April

An 18-month development project at Amdahl Ireland’s premises in Swords culminated in the launch of a web-based training methodology that enabled learners to receive information as text, audio or video formats according to their personal preferences.

Pebblesoft Learning, the California start-up behind this ‘architecture of learning objects’, was part-owned by Amdahl. It had formed a group in Swords to develop the prototype of its real-time tuition system and to test it with courseware for the Amdahl customer services organisation.

July

Eon Technologies released a web banking application, called Java NetBank, which was followed in 1998 by BankFrame, a repository of Java components, tools and solution sets for building retail financial systems. According to the Dublin-based development firm, BankFrame was the world’s first Java-based framework for banking applications.

The three founders of Eon Technologies had previously worked for a company that had supplied ACCBank’s mainframe computer applications. They formed their new venture in 1994 to support this installation and to develop more modern client-server systems for the bank. Eon became an early adopter of Java and attracted the attention of Sun by introducing its web-centric technology to an applications category where it had few partners. The company subsequently won a breakthrough deal with BankFrame at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

Siebel Systems acquired Eon Technologies, or Eontec as it was known in its later years, in 2004.

The Women’s Education and Resource Centre at University College Dublin published ‘WOW Women on the Web’ by Helen Fallon. This study drew on international and Irish sources to discuss female participation in science and technology in general and in the internet, especially with regard to women accessing and using web information.

It also contained a directory of gender-related resources on the internet, including web gateways, bibliographic services and online discussion groups.

The report included a list of internet service providers in Ireland, guidelines on web page creation and advice on using the AltaVista and Infoseek search engines.

The Irish Times acquired the Ireland.com domain name and used it for more than a decade to carry breaking news stories. It also tried to attract viewers by offering free email addresses in this domain.

October

Stuart Coulson and Gerry Samuels co-founded and incorporated travel e-commerce specialist Gradient Solutions in Dundrum.

From its inception the company was both a software developer and web service manager. Its CyberCRS+ software accessed information on legacy systems run by airlines and other travel companies, then reformatted it for the web. Esat Net provided Gradient with international connectivity for its internet services.

December

Ten merchants in Ireland participated in e-Christmas – a European demonstration project for internet commerce led by Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and courier firm UPS. Visa and Mastercard processed the transactions.

eChristmas aimed to attract international buyers to European goods and their suppliers at a time when internet penetration in the United States was significantly higher than in Europe.

Some 6,000 Irish web users accessed the e-Christmas service, but the Irish merchants completed just 25 sales over three months.

10 February

The World Wide Web Consortium issued an official recommendation for the XML 1.0 specification, following eighteen months of deliberation on the new standard by an eleven-member working group.

Peter Flynn at UCC maintained a list of frequently asked questions about the language on behalf of this group. He also wrote the first book on XML tools, which Kluwer Academic Publishers released in July.

Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) aimed to address shortcomings in Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML) as a format for defining web documents. Both drew on the long-established Standard Generalized Mark-up Language, but HTML confined users to a limited set of tags whereas XML enabled them to define their own tags. It therefore facilitated a much richer range of metadata to support new web applications.

March

An Post began to test a ‘trusted third party’ system that would authenticate the identities of web users and enhance the security of online transactions. According to project manager Brendan McMorrow, the postal authority saw this experiment as more than a technology trial. It also aimed to study the business relationships, legislative requirements and data protection aspects of e-commerce.

The trial used Baltimore Technologies’ UniCert platform to generate digital certificates based on public key cryptography, while PostGem, the An Post subsidiary, provided network facilities. The launch of the Post.Trust service followed in May 1999.

March

Nortel announced general availability of its Symposium call centre server, a Windows NT system that equipped customer service agents to assist internet contacts as well as telephone callers.

The new release included Symposium Web Response Server, which was developed at the company’s multimedia business applications laboratory in Galway. This software integrated Symposium with existing web servers, routing each enquiry on a web form to an agent with appropriate skills.

27 July

Airline software specialist Datalex announced its first web applications. Alliance HTMaiL enabled users to access private email servers from web browsers in public locations like libraries, internet cafes and airport kiosks. Alliance ALC Internet Server connected web users into mainframes running the airline-specific ALC protocol.

Three months later the Dublin-based developer added reservations software to its portfolio of web products. This came through its acquisition of Web Ventures in Atlanta, Georgia. The company’s BookIt! terminal emulation packages supported access to airline computer reservations systems from travel trade web sites or from travel agents’ offices.

November

The newly formed Regional Media Bureau of Ireland launched web versions of seven provincial newspapers as the first phase of a project that aimed to bring all local newspapers in Ireland online.

Internet Ireland devised the configuration behind this initiative. The internet service provider based the project on the web hosting capacity of a single Silicon Graphics Origin server that ran the Informix Dynamic Server database system.

This service attracted the attention of Independent Newspapers, which had been slow to develop a web strategy. A subsidiary of the publishing group acquired Internet Ireland at the beginning of 2000.

November

Dublin-based eWare installed a web-based customer care system at TransAer International Airlines and claimed that it had produced the first application of its type to be built totally on internet technologies.

Greg Casey and Ivan MacDonald had set up eWare in 1996 to create customer relationship management software for mid-market organisations. Accpac International acquired the company in 2002.

25 March

Finance Act 1999 was signed into law, establishing a framework for all tax returns to be filed electronically and for all tax records to be made accessible online.

The Revenue Commissioners not only proceeded to invite bids from contractors electronically, but also used its web site as the information channel for the tendering process. Andersen Consulting won the contract to construct an online system for taxation management and the resulting Revenue On-Line Service, better known as ROS, went live in 2000.

April

Speech recognition technology vendor Lernout & Hauspie announced the first real-time language translation service on the web and concentrated its efforts to attract paying users on the localisation industry in Dublin.

The Belgian developer tailored this service to suit short documents. It was based on the company’s iTranslator machine translation software, which supported bi-directional translations for more than a dozen language pairs.

Lernout & Hauspie named Esat Telecom Group as a web portal partner for this service, reporting that Esat had identified a requirement for quick translations among its business customers. Lernout & Hauspie had opened an Irish sales subsidiary in 1997.

Banking software developer CR2 landed the first sales of its BankWorld product at Rietumu Banka in Latvia and Staffordshire Building Society in the UK.

The two-year-old Dublin company positioned BankWorld as a web-native system built entirely from internet technologies – not just a web-enabled version of an existing banking application.

11 May

A group of 25 technology companies announced the formation of the Application Service Provider Industry Consortium to sponsor research and foster standards for delivering computer applications as services on the web. In its first six months the group signed up more than 200 member companies.

The global internet infrastructure in 1999 was not yet sufficiently robust to support the consortium’s online computing concepts, but its work paved the way for the software-as-a-service model that took off in later years.

21 May

Telecom Eireann acquired a 51 per cent shareholding in e-commerce applications specialist Trinity Commerce. The company also announced that it was opening a new office in Canary Wharf, London to compete in the UK market.

Trinity Commerce subsequently changed its name to Ebeon and expanded into the US. But the company ceased trading and laid off 170 employees in January 2001.

June

Web service provider Network365 started operations in Kilmacanogue with Raomal Perera as its managing director. The new firm offered a complete online storefront and sales processing service, based on its own Retail365 software suite.

In its early days Network365 promoted itself as a commerce service provider and won a major contract from mobile phone retailer Carphone Warehouse. It subsequently switched its focus to e-commerce platforms for mobile network operators and expanded internationally with branches in Japan, Italy, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, Britain, Latin America and the US.

July

Forfás, which advised the government on trade and technology policies, published a report on Ireland’s position in the developing digital economy and the implications of electronic commerce over the next three to five years.

The document recommended actions that government, the development agencies and individual enterprises should consider, identifying the issues facing key industry sectors and assessing the legal and regulatory framework required for e-commerce.

Forfas based this report on the deliberations of a steering group of industry representatives and state agency officials.

October

Parallel Internet introduced its XML-based pTools collection of software components for content publishing and management. The internet solutions company had developed this toolset to address recurring content management issues on its customers’ web sites and to streamline the presentation of the same information on different platforms and in different languages.

In the mid-2000s the firm changed its name to pTools Software.