Deirdre O’Byrne

My journey into computing began with my father, who had been working with the machines since well before I was born. I can recall in the late 1970s he brought home a luggable PC, and was excited to show us how it could connect back to the office over a telephone line.

Things escalated in the early 1980s, with the explosion in the home computer scene. My first computer was a ZX81 and, with the help of an uncle who was also a tech head, I quickly learned BASIC. Our home computers went from the ZX81 to a Dragon 32 to a TI-99/4A to a BBC Master to an Acorn Archimedes. I learned machine code and Pascal, and the Archimedes was eventually given an IEunet connection.

I was a PhD student in University College Galway (UCG) when it was connected to HEAnet’s IP network, and quickly learned basic IP networking. I was excited to learn that Ireland On-Line – a commercial ISP – was based nearby. In 1994 I decided that the PhD was not going to happen and left UCG. My CV quickly found its way into the hands of Barry Flanagan at IOL. And thus I became IOL’s second full-time employee, and first full-time technical employee.

My role was everything and anything to do with keeping the technology running and the users happy. This ranged from system administration tasks to technical support to development.

Ronan Mullally, who had made significant contributions to IOL by that time, was still in college. I was amused to see that Ronan was the first user on IOL’s user database, followed by Barry. Cornelia Tobin was the other full-time employee as office manager.

The first major change came when Barry pivoted to use Pipeline, which made the internet easy to use by giving dial-in customers a graphical interface to Gopher. Pipeline provided an email service but had nothing to do with the web. It ran under Solaris on some sort of Sun box that was constantly crashing.

Then came Trumpet Winsock and the Netscape Navigator web browser and we could start providing customers with a pure IP connection. Initially these were SLIP connections, but then PPP became the preferred method of connecting.

Netscape Navigator was, of course, the client software which truly launched the World Wide Web. In the early days NCSA HTTPd was the only game in town for web server software, though the Apache HTTP Server quickly took over.

PC hardware running Linux was the standard for basically every web site I was ever involved with. We wrote web pages by hand using a plain text editor – there was no CSS – and, since most web pages were static, CGI was rarely needed.

Microsoft launched its FrontPage HTML editor in 1997, but for those who knew the markup language already it was often quicker and neater to just use a text editor. Indeed FrontPage didn’t work well with the way the Apache web server handled clicks within images – so I submitted a 5-byte patch to the Apache Software Foundation to fix the problem.

Initially dynamic web pages were served by Perl and the odd shell script (especially when system administration tasks needed to be done – like registering new users), followed by PHP/FI. The latter in particular, along with the MySQL database server and the Apache web server, made developing e-commerce sites relatively easy, especially since many of the later bells and whistles (auto-complete search forms, for example) had not yet been introduced.

Java and JavaScript opened up new possibilities for dynamic content from 1995 onwards. Frankly I preferred PHP/FI, which became PHP3 by the millennium – it was so much simpler to develop with.

A major win for IOL in the early days of my time there was Kenny’s bookshop, which in 1994 became only the second bookshop in the world to go online. Orders were collected by online forms which simply emailed the order to Kenny’s. It was written in Perl, with server-side include files to populate the web pages with Kenny’s catalogue.

When I joined IOL, there was only one phone number – a Galway number – that could be used to access the service – and there was a 64 kilobit line to Dublin over which all our internet traffic went. There was a pretty urgent need for a Dublin point-of-presence which, through a local number, would give us access to a market of over a million people. That was achieved fairly quickly, but it came with a catch – the internet traffic generated at the Dublin point-of-presence would travel over a leased line to the servers in Galway, and then back over another leased line to Dublin and out to the Internet. We needed to move lock, stock and barrel to Dublin.

The first Dublin offices were on Amiens Street. Barry and Ronan had moved all the equipment there in 1995. The work in Amiens Street, however, became quite repetitive – it was a blur of setting up .iol.ie domains, the odd .ie domain, and system administration. There were few development opportunities to break the monotony – one was for Lawlink, which connected Ireland’s solicitors to the Companies Registration Office and to the Land Registry.

In 1995 Lawlink commissioned PostGem and Ireland On-Line to redesign its services so that they would be available through the internet. At the time that I was working on that project I met Norman Crowley – co-founder of the Solutions Group – who poached me from IOL in 1996. This move involved a bit more money and it was a chance to do more development work.

Solutions Group became Trinity Commerce which became Ebeon. Brian Bardin – another of the company’s co-founders – was my boss there. Pat Crawford sold our services. My brother Brian joined us in 1996.

The years that followed were again a blur, but this time of proper e-commerce sites. There was a mix of a few large projects and lots of small ones. I can recall working on some of the animations for an optometrist’s site. We also did one for a mortgage provider – I think it was ICS – and two for car dealerships out around the Naas Road area. It’s really hard to remember, as they were fairly thick and fast.

Technology, software, processes and concerns moved very quickly. Spam started to be a major problem in the mid-1990s before the roll-out of Bayesian filtering. Security was lax until the internet became fast enough that hackers started to have effective brute-force techniques.

Of course there was Y2K – I read the famous online press release by Auckland airport saying that there were no Y2K effects observed, except that the press release itself was dated 1st Jan 1900! In our case, one of our web sites reported the date as January 19100 – an easily fixable, and basically inconsequential, bug.

Unfortunately for me, one of the projects I got involved in was connecting Dairygold’s suppliers to a portal through which they could look at everything from milk volumes to the health of their herd. It was a long, slogging project, which suffered from not having been properly scoped out in the beginning. I had only just been released from the Dairygold project when Ebeon collapsed in January 2001.

Last edit: September 2023

© Deirdre O’Byrne 2023