Shangri-La Follow-on

The main cause of inefficiency during the meeting was due to the parochialism of the participants which was generally encouraged by their hierarchical management because it was assumed that manufacturing was the major source of profitability and that it had to be closely located near the engineering.

It was understood that R.BLOCH intended to build a new engineering organization in a new location, i.e., BRIDGEPORT Conn. and that selected participants will have to move there and some will have to expatriate. As almost all participants did not intend to start from scratch their professional --and sometimes personal life, so there was a considerable reluctance to follow a person who never imposed himself as a charismatic leader.

Just after Shangri-La, Bull reorganized its engineering to be able to take a strong position in the incoming bargaining.

Marc BOURIN took over both Engineering and Planning for the future Medium Systems machine, replacing Pierre DAVOUS
Thierry CHAIN took responsibility of Software, replacing Jean Paul BOSS .
Hardware Development was then split between Christian JOLY for technology and implementation
and Georges LEPICARD for system design.
André RIVIERE was named in charge of Marketing and Planning.
Product Planning itself was under the responsibility of Jean-Philippe BECKER assisted by Jacqueline VIDAL , and Lucien NEGRE.

1970

During the period of November 1969 to April 1970, each organization was continuing work on its own part of the project. A relatively weak coordination was held in Bridgeport under the authority of Robin KERR for interior decor and software and Al CONOVER for hardware and product planning.

A commonalty with IBM S/360 I/O at channel- program software level was studied at that time to evaluate a S/360 emulation. The general specification of the PSI channel was specified and particularly its radial configuration as opposed to the multi-drop IBM channel.

Bull performed an analysis of a paging architecture in measuring the sensibility of the operation of IBM OS/MVT running under CP67 on the Grenoble university 360/67. It should be remembered that main memories were still extremely small and that it was requested to operate a full functionality operating system on 64KB, and there was even a proposal to run such an OS -- with paging, into a 4KB memory for the low-end "A" system !

follow-on