HistoryOfMIS

The Management Information Systems Group at UCD School of Business in the College of Business and Law. Management Information Systems (MIS) was established in 1979 as a research and teaching group within the UCD School of Business. The masters programmes designed and taught by members of the MIS group have always addressed contemporary needs, to provide students of the day with skills and knowledge addressing the key issues of organisations, systems, technology and innovation.

In 1999 the MIS group launched Ireland's first masters in electronic commerce. The innovation resulted from growing pressure from business and academics to respond to the rapidly evolving business and educational environment. John Mooney, then Associate Dean for Information Technology at the Business School highlighted the crucial role of technology in any organisation's eCommerce strategy. At the same time that MIS launched the Masters in eCommerce, UCD's Smurfit School of Business benefited from an IR£3 million donation from entrepreneur Denis O’Brien to support the Business School's technology strategy including a complete upgrade of the Blackrock campus's digital infrastructure (news item).

The mis.ucd.ie web site has undergone a number of incarnations over its still relatively brief existence (10 year birthday in 2006). The initiative to develop and roll-out a public web presence was pretty ambitious for its day; to host and manage the teaching and research output of what was then the Department of Management Information Systems, integrating web content into the teaching programmes, improve communication between faculty and students, and raise the visibility of research activities.

'* The venerable Waybackmachine is one of the internet's first archives, it stores simple copies (usually 1 level deep) of web sites from the dawn of Internet time. A really useful research for anyone involved in conducting internet life histories, unfortunately it is an incomplete resource and often only really offers a snapshot in time of a front page.

The first version was created by Simha Magal, subsequently taken on by Peter Keenan. John Mooney encouraged the development of the site - but didn't actually do any work on it ;-). Blake Ives was visiting in the Department at the time and arranged for the first ISWorld mirror to be setup in Ireland, the mirror was hosted by the MIS department and its old link can be seen in the first home page.

The Micro Centre

Computing in the Faculty of Commerce at UCD was located in the Micro Computer Centre. The Microcentre was also known as the BMC (Business Micro Computer Centre) and was opened in 1985. Situated in the space between the University restaurant and the current Engineering Building, it served the Business School for 10 years before being decomissioned to provide more car parking space for UCD's Belfield campus in 1995.

One of the first pieces of faculty marketing, propaganda we called it, was for the faculty of Commerce programme, John Mooney in the forground down at the Microcentre.

"I remember the day that picture was taken, we put the only colour machine we had at the very end of the row of computers, we turned the colour screen towards the photographer and angled the other screens slightly away from him. Very cute" PK

The Microcentre was originally fitted out with a number of powerful Ericsson PC 1030-002 computers. The machine ran MS-DOS, students used VisiCalc and programmed with batch files. The Ericsson was selected by John Mooney because it offered the best quality value feature set at the time. Unfortunately the market was less enamoured of these great machines and Ericsson eventually stepped out of the PC market all together. To following account from the curator at Datasalen gives us a flavour of the setting of this corporate drama.:

    "Today. Maybe you have an Ericsson, if so, it's probably a mobile phone,
    even a smart phone camera and media player. But as many other companies,
    Ericsson has also been a personal computer maker. 

    Think back to 1984. This is the year of the computing classics; the Apple
    Macintosh, the Commodore 64, and the first IBM clones including the
    Ericsson PC.  The Ericsson PC is the direct successor of Ericsson's first
    foray into personal computer manufacture, their first model, the Ericsson
    Step One. The Ericsson PC was very different to the Ericsson Step One, it
    was fully compatible with the IBM PC, it was an IBM-clone. You could choose
    either a 5.25" floppy disk drive and a 10 MB hard disk drive (the 1031-102
    model) or the 1030-002 model which came with dual 5.25" floppy disk drives.

    A year later Ericsson developed the successor to this Intel 8088-based
    XT-computer, an AT-computer based on the Intel 80286 CPU.  With these
    machines Ericsson had made a serious attempt to establish itself in the US
    PC market but had no luck at all. Americans preferred their own well known
    IBM rather than a completely unknown foreign machine. It became a gigantic
    flop. Even in Sweden Ericsson could notice the competitors and their cheap
    IBM-clones, and so Ericsson eventually sold off the complete datadivision -
    including the terminal-part - to Finish Nokia in 1988. And within a short
    period of time, Nokia too, withdrew from the computer industry."

    Tommy / curator, Datasalen

Ephemera

Found in the rubble of the old Micro Computer Centre after it was bulldozed.:

    Oh lucious JM, guardian of the micros
    On golden toes towards us he tiptoes
    Oh tender JM, tall + fair
    Treat our feeble intellect with care
    Listen to our mumbled prayer
    An remember once an undergrad 
                       you were!
                             anon undergrad