We're back! Museum opening to the public every Saturday from May 27th!

Over the last few months, our technology heritage facility has catered for many visiting school and special interest groups who were enthused by the experience in what can be correctly dubbed a 'Living Museum'.

But from May 27th, we will be opening the doors to the general public every Saturday from 2pm to 4pm. We have spent much of the last year revamping this national  treasure putting in new thematic displays including a games zone with original Xbox consoles connected on a pre-broadband LAN (Local  Area Network) to allow multiple players on one game. So popular at teenager game parties in the early 2000s.Thanks to Philip Burke for the consoles with the Lan box and to Diarmuid Keaney for the screens.

To attend this very special opening, register at Eventbrite https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/638800598787

More details of our new exhibits to follow daily on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/ccmireland

To mark the 50^th anniversary of the arrival of Digital Equipment Corporation to Galway, the museum has commissioned a series of interviews with those who were involved with Digital over the years.

Digital played a major role in the development of Galway as it grew to become the vibrant city it is today. It also brought ground-breaking technology to Ireland and in doing so it sowed the seeds that led to Ireland becoming a global player in the hi-tech sector.

Interview 1: Bruce Ryan, a member of the start-up team and the first Financial Controller of the Galway plant. Interviewed by Paddy Donohoe

Interview 2: Charlie Mulligan, former plant manager of Clonmel and Galway. Interviewed by Kevin O’Reilly

The museum wish to thank those who agreed to be interviewed and to all the interviewers.

from all at the Computer & Communications Museum of Ireland.The photo is of a special iconic phone made for the Irish Diaspora market in the 1980s by the Galway-based Canadian telecommunications corporation known as Northern Telecom. The company opened a major manufacturing base at Mervue in 1973. In the mid 1990s, it changed its name to Nortel Networks, later to Nortel before its Galway operations were taken over by Avaya in 2009 which is today one of the city's business sector's flagships.

Lukasz Porwol and Brendan Smith are further developing a virtual version of the Museum that they initiated for the Back2Basics course held during the Galway Science and Technology Festival.
Next week, they are scanning some more of the iconic computers on display in the facility in order to make 3D versions for use in the Virtual Museum.
Check out phase 1 of this project at
https://hubs.mozilla.com/oj9PBtU/right-tremendous-nation/
Use Control key in combination with keys Q, W, E and S to move around the virtual room.

Back2Basics

Back2Basics – Resurrecting the Computer Coding of the 1970s/1980s!

Eventbrite

As part of the Galway Science and Technology Festival, the Computer and Communications Museum of Ireland and the Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics will host Back2Basics, a coding workshop on BASIC which was the programming language that represented the birth of personal computing and was taught in Irish colleges and schools from the early 1970s up until the early 1990s. Open to all age groups, it will provide a lovely trip down memory lane for the children of yesterday and will be an interesting even fun experience for today’s young coders.There will also be an additional and exciting 21stcentury flavour as participants will further benefit from a virtual tour of a technology heritage museum populated by iconic computers from the 1980s such as the Commodore 64, Commodore Pet and the Apple Macintosh

The Playstation console popularised optical discs (CD and DVD) for games storage and led to the demise of the once all powerful cartridge. It was the first games console to sell over 100 million units

This video is part of the 'Did You Know' series from the Computer and Communications Museum of Ireland. Every day during this year's Galway Science and Technology Festival, the museum will post a video in its quirky 'Did You Know' series.

Volunteers will in the next few days start the production of a series of new short films providing interesting and even quirky facts on some of the museum artifacts. These will complement the existing suite of informative videos contained in the Our Collections section of this website.
The first batch will focus on different aspects of our vintage radio equipment and will be narrated by Dr. Frank McCurry.

As part of this year’s Galway Science and Technology Festival, the computer and communications museum, in conjunction with Insight and the Data Science Institute, will host a series of coding workshops using the original programming language on the very computers by some of the same mentors that provided such teaching in schools, colleges and computer clubs in the city during the early 1980s!
The workshops will take place at Data Science Institute subject to COVID-19 restrictions then current. If this cannot happen, we will host online workshops using virtual console simulators and reschedule the ones using the vintage computers to a suitable time in 2021.

Back to the Future - the 1980s revisited
Today so many good-minded tech savvy educators are working really hard to promote computer coding amongst our young people through coding clubs such as Coderdojo and by campaigning to have it accepted as a curriculum subject in schools. We see it as our mission to transform our kids from being passive Computer Users to active Computer Creators. Coding is a skill set that is increasingly beneficial in so many professions and will be even more so as the century rolls by.

But in some ways it can be seen as a ‘Back to the Future’ saga. For during the 1970s up until the mid 1980s,  using a computer was synonymous with knowing how to code one. It was a programming language called BASIC that introduced personal computing. In a time when few people ever saw a computer let alone use one, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz of Dartmouth College USA designed a language in 1964 that allowed ordinary people use computers to carry out many different tasks from writing letters, undertaking research, solving problems and playing games. The language was known as BASIC (Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) and had commands with easy-to-relate-to English words that related to their functionality (Print, Goto, If___Then, and later Input). Programming had lost its high level mathematical elitism and could be understood by everyday people. But what truly made it accessible to all was the invention of the microprocessor, which formed the basis of the first fully-assembled personal (table top) computers that started to appeared from 1977.  The Commodore Pet, RadioShack Tandy TRS-80 and the Apple 11 that were launched that year were off-the-shelf low cost computers aimed at the ordinary consumer and schools. All three came bundled with BASIC. Within a few years the standard version of the language on most computers was Microsoft Basic invented by Bill Allen and Bill Gates.

Schools all over the world started to teach programming. By 1983, most secondary schools in Galway had computer labs populated with computer equipment donated by Ballybrit-based Digital Equipment Corporation(DEC) where students learnt to code. The demise of BASIC and indeed programming in general across educational establishments happened with the rise of application software or what we know call apps from the late 1980s.

-Brendan Smith

A 'Byte of the Apple' exhibition in late 2020.
The museum will host a major exhibition to celebrate 40 years of the Apple corporation in Ireland.
The expo will include a full range of mainly operational computers from  over the last four decades including the iconic Apple IIe, Lisa,  Macintosh, original iMac,  iPods, early iPhones and iPads. Promises to be a very  memorable, exciting 'hands-on' experience!
In October 1980, the company opened its first manufacturing factory outside the United States, at Hollyhill in Cork city where it assembled Apple II personal computers for the European market.
Forty years on, it is still there. In 1980, they were assembling Apple II personal computers in Cork for the European market.

Brendan Smith

"Those who worked in the computer industry in Ireland in the 1970s and  1980s were greatly saddened by the recent death of Mike Mulqueen, the  first Irish employee of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Mike wasn’t  a tech guru but nevertheless his contribution to the growth of the  Hi-Tech sector in Ireland was immense.
Mike, a native of Co.  Limerick, came to Galway in 1971 as Personnel Manager for DEC which had  just announced that it was establishing its European Manufacturing base  in Galway. He was joined by a start-up team from the US and within three  months he had recruited the first production workers. By Christmas  staff numbers had grown to 140. More importantly Mike, as Personnel  Manager, had started to establish the values and ethics of company  president Ken Olsen, which had already permeated the young Digital in  the US. He did that superbly well and helped create the work environment  which so many of those who worked for the company in Ireland look back  on with great pride and great fondness.
Digital was a fairly small  player in the computer sector in 1971 but it went to become number 2 to  IBM on a global basis. At the same time, with Mike still in charge of  HR, the Galway plant had advanced from being a low-tech core memory  manufacturer to a state of art hi-tech operation producing complex  hardware and software for the EMEA region. It had become a centre for  R&D.
The success of the Galway plant was used by IDA Ireland to  demonstrate to the Apples, Intels and Microsofts of this world that  Ireland should be their location of choice when opening up in Europe.  They duly arrived and have gone on to prosper. Their presence in Ireland  later attracted companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Paypal,  LinkedIn and many others.
Mike treasured the many friends he made in  Digital and travelled from his home in Limerick on a number of occasions  to be with former colleagues, at the First Thursday coffee mornings in  the Huntsman.
Members of the board of the Computer and  Communications Museum of Ireland would like to offer their sympathy to  Mike’s sons, Billy and Michael, his grandchildren and the extended  Mulqueen family."
-Liam Ferrie

Photograph shows Mike  (right) signing into the Computer and Communications Museum of Ireland  for the DEC night in 2011 accompanied by the late Des McKane (centre)  and the late Chris Coughlan (left) who was then Chairperson of the museum. All three gentlemen were employees of Digital Galway.