BULL computers
chronological history
The following is a summary
list of detailed events collected by members of Fédération des Equipes Bull
and available in French version of the site. Only, events that may have an interest
for an international audience have been translated into English.
This document mentions only the technical events that may have impacted the life of the
company.
To attempt to put Bull history in the perspective of the whole industry, a time-line of events that had marked the "Information Technology industry" has been developed. Bull's main milestones are confronted to those of the industry.
Groupe BULL is one of the most important data processing company in Europe. Evolved from punched card machines patents developed in Norway by Fredrik Rosen Bull, the company was installed in PARIS, France in the early 1930s.
In the 1950s, it became the second punched card equipment manufacturer in Europe, after IBM, and started to compete in the emerging computer market, initially by completing its card equipment by the successful calculator Gamma 3. Compagnie des Machines Bull attempted to compete with IBM and Univac in the high range market by producing the innovative, but complex, Gamma 60.
Faced to the growing cost of financing the equipments it leased, and faced to the competition from IBM, Univac and others, Bull was bought in 1964 by General Electric and became integrated in the American company as a division named Bull-General Electric.
In 1970, GE pulled itself out of the production of EDP equipment and sold its computer division (including Bull-GE) to Honeywell. Bull-GE was renamed Compagnie Honeywell-Bull (CHB) and, integrated into Honeywell, was assigned the responsibility of the medium part of the new Honeywell product line.
In 1975, the French government pressed the owners of CII (Compagnie Industrielle pour l'Informatique) to merge that company with CHB that was, again, renamed CII-Honeywell-Bull (CII-HB) with a majority of French interests.
In 1982, after an election bringing a "Union de la Gauche" majority to govern France, CII-HB was put on the list of companies to be nationalized. Groupe Bull, as the company became then known, also absorbed almost all the rest of the French computer industry.
After around two years of hexagonal focus and of governmental interference, Groupe Bull adopted a policy of strategic independence and concluded alliances on a world-wide basis. It kept the Honeywell relationship, with a product line essentially common. It tried to found alliance on the UNIX market with MIPS, Ridge. It resumed links with the Japanese NEC.
In 1986, Honeywell retired from the computer business that was taken back by BULL (with a minority participation by NEC). The North American operation was integrated in Groupe Bull as Honeywell-Bull (later Bull-HN). The Italian operation, that had cooperated with the French since the late 1950s, became integrated in Bull's European operations.
Bull also took over the American microcomputer company Zenith in 1989. To penetrate the, then promising, UNIX market, Bull, after ended a MIPS alliance, concludes a new alliance with IBM around the PowerPC and developed with IBM the Escala symmetric multi-processing product line.
After such a fast growth, in 1994, a restructuring began. Bull-HN was stripped from the majority of its assets acquired that were by Wang. Zenith was integrated with NEC America and Packard Bell under NEC leadership. The proprietary lines were progressively closing down, starting by the low end GCOS4 and GCOS6. The restructuring also implied to close several manufacturing plants the activity of which was reduced by the use of a majority of parts acquired externally. Bull's activity focused progressively towards integration tasks. The cost-cutting measures had the major purpose to allow the return of the company to the private sector that occurs from 1994, with France Telecom, NEC and Motorola being the initial main shareholders and with a floating stock was put on the Markets in 1996.
Warning: the following pages uses both French and international English terms for job titles. President is chief operating officer (directeur général in French). CEO (chief executive officer) is PDG, since 1941 in French, CFO is directeur financier in France, director is usually member of the Board (administrateur).
Outline of the Chronology:
Revision : 27 mai 2002.