How Irish companies brought us texting and took us online

Web 1.0

This is the story of how Barry Flanaghan brought the internet into Irish homes. Though it’s an Irish story, there are variations of it in countries across the world.

In France there was the Minitel, which was the world's most successful online service prior to the World Wide Web.

It was launched in 1982 by Gerard Thery, a telecoms engineer. Minitels were boxy computers where one could look up phone numbers, buy concert tickets, check cinema listings and do online banking.

They were also free. France Telecom issued them to every house in a bid to cut the cost of printing phone books.

In the US Jan Brandt spearheaded direct marketing for America Online and was given free rein of AOL’s marketing strategy. Her plan was to get AOL CD’s into the hands of as many Americans as possible and thus get those people onto the World Wide Web. This meant producing a lot of CDs - AOL says that for several weeks in 1998 they used the world's entire CD production capacity.

It was hugely successful: at one point they were logging a new customer every six seconds. Brandt helped increase their number of subscribers from 200,000 to more than 22 million, bringing many Americans online for the first time.

And Barry Flanaghan was doing similar in Ireland. He set up Ireland’s first internet services provider and didn’t just sell the internet to Ireland but the concept of what the internet could be.

Also in this podcast: Joe Cunningham is another Irish communications pioneer who overcame setbacks to play a pivotal role in the establishment of texting as a powerful new medium.

This podcast was made by Enda O’Dowd with help from John Casey and Declan Conlon.

Artwork by Paul Scott.

Music by Kirk Osamayo and Sergey Cheremisinov.

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