Ian Sharp, Entrepreneur, 1932-2021

By Chris Gainor

Special to the Globe and Mail

July 23, 2021

The information technology companies of today with networked computers and casually dressed staff from diverse backgrounds were unheard of fifty years ago. Yet a company that met that description was headquartered in the heart of Toronto’s financial district in the 1960s through the 1980s.

That company was I.P. Sharp Associates, a Canadian software and communications firm that was a world leader in terms of networking and organization in the decades before the internet revolutionized business and life. Its unorthodox but beloved leader was Ian Sharp, who died in Sarasota, Florida, on July 16, a few months after being diagnosed with lung cancer. He was 89.

I.P. Sharp Associates, also known as IPSA, pioneered many computer networking applications that were years ahead of their time, including database systems to support financial markets and the aviation and energy industries, a real-time global financial system to manage interbank money market exposures, an international stock settlement system, a real-time energy trading platform, and an international stock borrowing and lending system, among others.

Under Mr. Sharp’s leadership, the company was also famous for its lack of hierarchy and its informal style of work. Its employees were posted around the world and were described as “an eclectic mix of people” who didn’t fall within the racial, gender or credential limitations of the last century.

Ian Patrick Sharp was born on March 25, 1932, in Dublin, Ireland. His Irish mother and Scottish father resided in London, but his mother insisted on going home to give birth. He was raised in London and Leeds, with a wartime evacuation back to Dublin. He later trained as a fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force during his National Service, then studied engineering at Cambridge University.

While working as a management trainee in the British steel industry, Mr. Sharp was put to work on a Ferranti Pegasus computer, a 1950s British computer that like most similar machines of the time used vacuum tubes to control electrical currents.

When the computer project wound down, Mr. Sharp decided to seek opportunities elsewhere and emigrated to Canada in 1960. In Toronto he found work as chief programmer at Ferranti's Canadian branch, Ferranti-Packard Ltd., where he headed a small team that wrote the operating system and compilers for a mainframe computer, the Ferranti-Packard 6000.

Most computers of the time were mainframe machines that filled large rooms and required cooling systems and large amounts of electrical power. Their computing power was only a small fraction of that available on today’s smart phones. As the 1960s began, transistors and other semiconductor devices, which used less power and took less space, replaced vacuum tubes and opened the door to more powerful and sophisticated computers.

The FP 6000, which Mr. Sharp called a “great giant beast” of a computer, was one of the first computers capable of multitasking. Only six of the computers were sold, with customers including the Saskatchewan Power Corporation, the Toronto Stock Exchange, the Department of National Defence, and the U.S. Federal Reserve.

Ferranti and its Canadian branch were withdrawing from the computing field at the time the Ferranti-Packard 6000 came into production, but the computer became the model for a generation of more powerful mainframes built by another British maker.

While on a trip to London in 1961, Mr. Sharp interviewed and hired a programmer at Ferranti named Audrey Williams who wished to transfer to the Canadian branch. They married in 1963 and had a son and a daughter. Although Mrs. Sharp took time out for family duties, she worked as a programmer at I.P. Sharp throughout its existence and organized the annual Christmas party for employees’ children.

When Ferranti-Packard folded its computer division, Mr. Sharp and six colleagues formed I. P. Sharp Associates in 1964. Over the next 23 years the company grew into a multinational enterprise, with about 600 employees in 60 branches in Asia, Australia, Europe and North America. I.P. Sharp’s Fortune 500 clients included Morgan Stanley, Hitachi, McGraw Hill, the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank, British Petroleum, Xerox, Credit Suisse, and Kodak.

While the roots of the internet are commonly credited to the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. military starting in 1969, I.P. Sharp Associates was often on the scene with its own versions of internet technologies during those years before the internet became widespread in the 1990s.

In work championed by one of the firm’s co-founders, Roger D. Moore, IPSA made time available to customers on its mainframes across Canada and then farther afield. Said Mr. Sharp: “You hear a lot these days about the cloud. What we were doing in those days was the cloud.”

The firm also hired the developer of the APL computer language, Kenneth E. Iverson, to work with Moore and others to advance the language to a version known as SHARP APL. It also offered its own form of email in APL long before email become commonly available, and it was widely used in the company for business and personal purposes.

Mr. Sharp was well known for giving free rein to very bright and driven employees – casual dress and flex-time were taken for granted at I.P. Sharp. “Our company had incredible diversity, but at the time we didn’t realize it,” said former employee Hugh Hyndman.

One of Mr. Hyndman’s colleagues, Jane Minett, remembers going to work for the company after having been introduced to it as a customer. She was appointed the manager of I.P. Sharp’s Calgary office at age 26, which raised eyebrows in the city’s still conservative business environment of the 1970s.

Already by 1973, I.P. Sharp had an electronic mail system known as Mailbox. Leslie Goldsmith was a 16-year-old high school student that year when he managed to overcome the system’s security features, and so he was hired to build an all-new email system called 666 Box that was more secure. “In 1973, that was a bold move,” he said. I.P. Sharp’s early email and networking systems often ran afoul of telephone and communications monopolies in various parts of the world, something Mr. Sharp called a “constant irritation” that he had to deal with.

“Ian never sought the limelight and was content to do well for the customer in any way he could,” Mr. Goldsmith explained. His colleague Lib Gibson had a story to illustrate the point: “I remember people urging Ian to dump a painful, overdue Morgan Stanley project. There was no contractual penalty. ‘But we gave our word,’ said Ian. That was the end of that.”

Both Ms. Minett and Mr. Hyndman said the soft-spoken Mr. Sharp’s style was a textbook example of management by walking around. He made a point of conversing with employees at all levels of the company and let them make their own decisions. Ms. Gibson said he did not choose employees based on credentials, and he did not punish failure, which freed people to take risks. “He would never set anyone up for failure though – and would be there when you needed an ear,” said Roseanne Wild, Mr. Sharp’s longtime assistant.

“The people the company recruited had a variety of backgrounds, often with a strong mathematical orientation,” former employee Scott Remborg remembered. “In interview situations Ian was less interested in someone’s Computer Science background and more interested in what else they knew. He knew the company could teach people particular skills so he would, with a wry smile, ask ‘so what else do you know?’”

Reuters, which wanted to move into the field of financial databases, acquired I.P. Sharp Associates in 1987, but the company’s spirit of enthusiasm and camaraderie lived on. Twenty-seven years after the sale, 200 “Sharpies” gathered in Toronto for a party to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the company’s creation.

Another legacy of I.P. Sharp Associates involves the notable careers its employees led after the company wound up. Ms. Gibson, Mr. Goldsmith and Ms. Minett were among several former I.P. Sharp employees who were involved in building business information services for The Globe and Mail. Ms. Minett, Mr. Remborg and other I.P. Sharp alumni helped create Sympatico, an early national internet provider jointly run by Bell Canada and other Canadian telephone carriers.

Mr. Sharp retired in 1989. He and his wife had already began spending winter breaks on Longboat Key on the west coast of Florida, and soon they became residents and eventually U.S. citizens. In retirement, Mr. Sharp became an avid tennis player, hanging up his racquet only eight weeks before his passing. His enjoyment of Bridge moved online when the COVID-19 pandemic began last year. Mr. Sharp was a longtime volunteer for Meals on Wheels, and he helped out other charitable causes.

Mr. Sharp is survived by his wife of 57 years, Audrey, daughter Helen, son Matthew, and three grandchildren.