… This is the second in a series of posts about how I ended up where I am today.
After the Motorola interview fell through, I got a second work experience placement at a place called Abbey Computer Training. PCs were just kicking off and everyone wanted to learn word processors, spreadsheets, CPM, DOS. The spreadsheet of choice was Lotus 1-2-3, which would come back to help me later in ways I couldn’t have predicted.
Within a week I was fully up to speed on all the software they taught. By the second week I was pulling things apart to understand how they worked underneath. I was there a few months and genuinely enjoyed it, but it was a tiny operation. The owner and a receptionist. There was no job to offer me, and he was honest about that.
What it did give me was a foothold. Enough experience on a CV to get me through the next door.
The Science of Getting Data Into a Computer
That next door was a company called Punch and Programming. The name tells you the history. They’d started out translating punch cards to computers, and by the time I arrived they’d moved on to keying in all kinds of documents. Pre-OCR, all manual.
Don’t let that fool you though. There is a genuine science behind getting data into a computer fast and accurately. Validation rules, error rates, throughput targets, interface design that minimises mistakes. It sounds mundane until you realise how much of the world ran on people doing this work well.
It was a family-run business and the staff were brilliant. Functional in a way that a lot of workplaces aren’t. There was a lot of manual and technical work, but I got time to tinker and could use the PC in my free time. They trained me on the internals of the IBM PC, from repair work down to how the chips themselves operated. Plus whatever software packages we were selling at the time.
Eventually I got a full-time job out of it. They were paying me next to nothing, but I had no idea what people in my kind of role were actually making. I was just happy to be doing the work.
A Map of Ireland, Taped to a Monitor
Two projects from that period stand out.
The first was for ENFO, the Department of the Environment’s public information service. They wanted an application where users could type in requests for water and air quality reports across Ireland, and it would generate graphs for them to review. A visualisation tool, basically.
The software I built it in has been lost to time. It was a DOS application that used VGA graphics and a kind of no-code step builder for creating applications. Not exactly the tools you’d choose today, but it was what I had.
The tricky part was the map. They wanted a detailed map of Ireland as the main interface, and graphics on PCs were still uncommon enough that nobody had a ready-made solution for this.
So I improvised. I got a sheet of clear plastic, traced over a printed map of Ireland capturing the key regional boundaries, taped the plastic to the monitor, and then sat there recreating it pixel by pixel on screen. It took hours.
When I demo’d the finished application, the room went quiet and then people started asking how I’d managed such a detailed map on a PC. The application got presented to the public for a year or so.
The Leaving Cert Results
The second project carried a bit more weight, in more ways than one.
In 1992 the Department of Education was in the process of computerising the Leaving Cert exam results. OCR was still a young science and their initial tests were far from reliable enough to trust with something this important. If results got corrupted or delayed, every student in the country would feel it.
To make sure everything would be processed on time, they needed a data entry system set up as a fallback. I was the support person for “Key Entry III” at the time, so I spent most of that period in Athlone. Setting up systems, building interfaces, training the UK data entry staff (Irish people weren’t allowed to do the actual keying, for obvious confidentiality reasons), and then validating those results before they went into the Department’s processing systems.
The public only ever see the results landing on a page. Behind that was an incredible amount of work and orchestration to get everything running. The Department of Education staff had mostly all been hired around the same year, so everyone knew everyone. It felt more like a family that happened to be under serious deadline pressure. People worked hard and genuinely enjoyed doing it together.
There was some irony in the fact that I was helping get Leaving Cert results out to the country, having never sat my own. My boss at the time actually told me to never mention this to anyone. Fair enough.
Endings
During all of this, Punch and Programming went through a company change. New name, Data Entry Ireland. New management. The culture shifted. I was made redundant, one of the first to go before the whole place eventually shut down.
I was unemployed again. But some of the customers who’d been left in the lurch by the closure reached out for help, and one of them ended up hiring me.
That next chapter would teach me a very different lesson. The previous years had shown me I could build things that impressed people. What I still hadn’t learned was what those things were worth.
This is the second in a series of posts about how I ended up where I am today. Next: a 1920s book from a priest, a German laser printer, and the moment a CEO tried to take credit for my work.