When Dennis Jennings did his first computer programming course in 1964 he wasn't at all convinced that computers made much sense for real life ... but since then he has been director of UCD's Computer Centre for 19 years, was one of the architects of the Internet, and is respected internationally as an expert on networking.
"It wasn't until I needed to use a computer to analyse data while doing my PhD on gamma ray astronomy that I realised their worth ... and then I got hooked. I got more interested in computers and the computing business than I was in physics."
The attraction solidified when he took a job as a programming adviser in what was then the UCD Computer Laboratory, after the third year of his PhD course. When he finished his doctorate, he spent a year doing research at Bristol, but found the call of the computer world was stronger than gamma rays. He came back to Dublin and joined a small but growth-orientated software and consultancy company, System Dynamics.
"In the five years I spent there, I learned an enormous amount about business computing, project management, financial and marketing issues, and running a business. The company developed very rapidly and I learned more there than I could have in any other environment ... it was a very exciting time."
In 1977 came an opening for a job which he had promised himself to get some day - director of the Computer Laboratory at UCD, then in the process of changing its name to the Computer Centre. He won the position at the relatively young age of 31, and he came in at a time of change of more than a name - demand for computer facilities was accelerating beyond the resources then available.
"We had one computer, to which people would come with their boxes of punched cards, and one remote terminal at the School of Engineering in Merrion Street. Soon after I arrived, we went into a major procurement exercise for a large-scale time-sharing computer costing £500,000 sterling, which was then a serious amount of money. It was a marvellous machine, a DEC 20 which had one megabyte of RAM memory and disc storage capacity of 1.2 gigabytes. We figured it would support about 50 on-line terminals."
For a time that satisfied the needs of the Computer Centre's main clients - the researchers, scientists and mathematicians in computational-oriented disciplines. But the demand was growing exponentially as new uses for computers were developed, and the computers themselves began to change from large central machines to stand-alone PCs. The Business School was an area which was moving particularly strongly into computers, for programming, statistical analysis and operations research. There was also a growing requirement from students for access to computing facilities, and the planning and implementation of a computer strategy had to be carefully managed. But carefully managed at speed, which made full use of Dennis Jennings's experience of working in the fast-growing commercial environment of System Dynamics.
"As well as increases in numbers, the sophistication of what the students were doing with the machines was also growing year by year ... it was a time of tremendous pressure on the computing facilities, and around 1979 I first became interested in the concept of networking as an important way of improving computer facilities, of linking computers together so that information and resources could be shared."
That idea brought forward what eventually became the network of the Irish universities - HEAnet. Dennis Jennings was one of the initiators of that project, which became a reality after the HEA agreed to fund it in 1984. In addition to linking the universities to each other, HEAnet links all of them to the global Internet, and is managed from UCD's Computer Centre under contract to the HEA.
"We've always taken the view that UCD Computing Services have a responsibility to provide leadership in the use of computing and computing technology, both on the campus and also to the wider academic community . . . and one of the ways we've done that is through pushing and promoting networking."
In the meantime, though, Dennis Jennings's own interest in networking was taking him further afield. In 1983 he became involved with, and was first president of, the new IBM-sponsored European Academic Research Network (EARN).
"I also had a heavy involvement with the European Commission at the time. I proposed the project which was eventually called Eurokom, providing electronic mail, computer-mediated conferencing and file transfer services to the research community throughout Europe. One of my motivations for doing that was to demonstrate that it was possible to run services in Ireland for the community in Europe. Eurokom is now a UCD-based campus company."
If 1984 was the pivotal date for HEAnet, for George Orwell, and for Apple Computer (which launched the Macintosh in that year), it also seems to have been particularly important for the development of UCD and global computer resources. It was the year that the College began thinking of setting up the campus network which today has links to almost every office and other kind of workplace in UCD. It was also the year that Dennis Jennings was invited to become director for networking at the National Science Foundation in Washington DC, USA. His brief was to design the network associated with the High Performance Computing initiative of the US Government in the areas of science and engineering research.
"I took the job in 1985, on a leave of absence basis, because I needed a change, and I felt the project might have an impact. I stayed for 15 months, and when I left I had been responsible for committing some $20 million of US taxpayers' money into setting up the NSFnet - which evolved into the cornerstone on which the global Internet has developed. The decisions that we made at that time, about the basic structure of the network and its protocols, have endured to today. And our vision of the time also became a reality - to offer to the research scientist and engineer, through the the single window of their computer workstation, access to the computing and information resources in the US or globally that they required. But we had no understanding that what we were creating would have such extraordinary, explosive growth and impact beyond the academic and research community."
The first 'backbone' of the system was implemented in 1986, coincidentally the same year that the plans for UCD's own campus network were completed. Today that network services 3,500 computers, 750 of which are directly accessible by any student. It also carries information from the College's library system, as well as Email and other services.
"In my view, the campus network is becoming the most important infrastructure on the campus. The Library and its databases are available on it, and it is already the delivery method of instruction material by a number of departments - the Department of Mathematics and the Graduate School of Business maintain course notes on the servers so that students can inspect them on screen, and print out what they require. People keep their files on the system, the Internet is available . . . and the network is within reach from outside through dial-up. Increasingly the network helps the University with its core business of providing information and teaching."
This is against a background of what Dennis Jennings calls a 'dramatic decline' in the budget per student for computer resources, while demand is ever-increasing. The next requirement to be addressed will only increase the pressure - the provision of Internet access and Email facilities to all students.
"Managing the finances in this situation has already become an interesting challenge. On Internet charges alone, we have gone from £50,000 sterling last year to £150,000 sterling this year . . . and I project a cost of £200,000 sterling for the next academic year."
His involvement in the basic design decisions for the Internet makes that whole area one of particular interest to Dennis Jennings. Though his primary focus is on the capacity of this ultimate network to store and provide information from anywhere to anyone who requires it, he recognises that its future development will be underpinned by the deep pockets of the information and entertainment industries rather than by the needs of researchers.
"It is actually fundamentally changing the way business and commerce and society will operate. It is creating a new way of conducting business of all sorts, it is changing methods of education, as our own WEST system has shown ... we're beginning to see that there is a 'cyberspace' analogue for most of the things that exist in the 'real' world. There's even now a company that is providing Neilson-type ratings for Internet sites - like TAM rating systems, they have computers in 1,000 homes across the US which actually measure what the owners do and see on their screens. They can tell you what sites get hit and how often, and what the demographics are."
The last 30 years have been for computing an extraordinary time, and computing has set up for the world in that same period some extraordinary potential. Dennis Jennings considers himself to be fortunate to have been a man for this time. And in the right places at the right times.
"I was fortunate to have had to learn something about computers to do my PhD, fortunate to have the mind development experience of doing my doctorate which allowed me to address the business problems that I later encountered. I was fortunate that the position I now hold came available in UCD when it did. I was also fortunate to learn about the EARN network and get involved, fortunate to be at the NSF at the right time to be in a position to do something fundamental to today's world."
It is a little more than that. Dennis Jennings is today, and perhaps always has been, fundamentally networked to tomorrow's world.