Honeywell was faced to a similar need for growth and had R&D cost problems. Honeywell Boston designers, during the same summer, had meetings similar to Shangri-La in Cape Cod, but in a less grandiose show. However, Honey- well killed their internal ACS (Advanced Computer System) project, essentially for technical reasons. ACS was an object-oriented machine, the performances of that being not able to compete against more conventional computers.
Honeywell decided eventually to buy the General Electric computer business that brought to the venture a strong distribution network in Europe specially in France and in Italy as well as uncommitted engineering development forces in several countries. Honeywell was then proud to post billboards calling out "The Other Computer Company".
In BULL, in July 1970 a small team of 4 people -- André BENSOUSSAN, Axel KVILEKVAL, Claude CARRE and Jean BELLEC, was assembled during 6 weeks to draft an "Overview of APL Operating System" that describes the main options of what later became GCOS64. A decision was made at this time to use segmentation as a Virtual memory management tool, while its role as a container of "objects" was precised. It was decided to separate the universe of the files --the "file system", accessed through data management, from the universe of computation: MULTICS was then in the process to add Data Management to its initial "single view" of the universe. The decision to implement the majority of the functions as Procedure calls services (ŕ la MULTICS) versus the operation of those functions under servers (monitors), with the natural exceptions of functionally asynchronous operations like scheduler, input reader, output writer... was taken at this time.
Starting from summer 1970, Honeywell intended to regroup the engineering forces of its units in BOSTON and the acquired General Electric engineering to build a new product line able to succeed to the then aging H2000 product line as well as to replace the GE100 and GE400 lines.
The role of GE6000 was not yet fully assessed , because the Sales network of GE was significantly inferior to that of Honeywell in the US; the only significant inroad of GE-600 was GE miscellaneous engineering de- partments and BULL-GE had suspended the marketing of that system in 1967 waiting for a fix of engineering troubles that plagued it in the 1966-1970 period. In fact, what happens after the merger was that an aggressive sales network with only the GE6000 to sell was able to encroach this system in the market in less time that Engineering was able to bring up a new line of computers!