‘Back to the Future’- Online Social Media, Video Conferencing & Cloud Computing in 1980s Galway

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'Computer Society' stand on Student Societies Day UCG (NUIG), Sept 1980

Technology innovation, communications and learning is so much part of the fabric of modern Galway. Children and their parents are together attending Saturday morning classes to learn how to code; people of all ages are daily accessing online services for hotel bookings, banking details and information services; teenagers are flirting online with their boyfriends and girlfriends in different schools during class time; robotics are taught in our third level colleges; our pre-teen and early youngsters are becoming renowned digital makers who are demonstrating their own programmable automated devices at the Young Scientist Exhibition in the RDS; a multi-national Mervue-based company employing over one hundred college graduates is developing a revolutionary new type of search engine; Galway’s high tech industry is creating thousands of jobs that is earning the city a worldwide  reputation for business and responsible for a large slice of Ireland’s export trade. Mobile phones and video conferencing communications are changing the way we socialise and do business.
 

Whilst these details could define Galway city in 2018, there are in fact stories of Galway as it was during the 1980s! 

Test of PDP-11 computers in Ballybrit Galway, 1975

Find out more about the city’s proud digital heritage at a fascinating talk by Brendan Smith, curator of the Computer and Communications Museum of Ireland based at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics at NUI Galway, that will take place at 2.30pm on Saturday February 24^th in the Galway City Museum.

Colin Laferty at the 'Computer Society' stand, Student Societies Day UCG (NUIG), Sept 1980