Professor John G Byrne added to Royal Irish Academy Dictionary of Irish Biography

Along with his PhD supervisor, Prof. William Wright, he famously arranged for the purchase of Trinity’s first computer in 1962 (an IBM 1620), before becoming head of the new department in 1969 and the first Chair of Computer Science in 1973. By the time he stepped down in 2001, the department had grown to house about 60 academic staff.

Prof. Byrne is credited with pioneering the growth of computer science in Ireland and was successful in winning numerous national and international grants for computer science research. He saw software and ICT as major growth opportunities for Irish industry and worked with IDA Ireland to help shape Ireland’s now major international role in the sector.

Prof. Byrne has left behind an invaluable legacy. His bequests to Trinity include the John Gabriel Byrne Computer Science Collection, which comprises his vast and historically significant collection of computing books and documents, slide rules, instruments, and machines, and which is currently housed in the O’Reilly Institute. He also included a bequest to enable the purchase of additional material for the collection.

The Dictionary of Irish Biography (DIB) is one of the flagship research programmes based at the Royal Irish Academy. It tells the island’s life story through the biographies of men and women born in Ireland, north and south, who came to prominence either at home or overseas, and the noteworthy Irish careers of those born outside Ireland.

Featuring comprehensive, scholarly biographies encompassing every sphere of human activity, the DIB is an indispensable work of reference for scholars, students, journalists, broadcasters, genealogists, diplomats and the general reader interested in Ireland’s past, or in the art of biography and life writing.

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Thomas Deane | Media Relations | deaneth@tcd.ie | +353 1 896 4685