Didn't ICT begin as BTC? British Tabulating Machine Co.
On Thu, 4 May 2000, Will Jennings wrote:
> OK, for what its worth;
> Lyons Brothers built the LEO because they wanted to computerize their
> business, but they couldn't find anyone selling commercial machines, so they
> went ahead and built their own. LEO, by the way, stands for Lyons Electronic
> Office. The LEO was actually completed in early 1951, and other companies
> heard about it and wanted it, so Lyons suddenly were in the computer
> business. Most people don't know this, but the LEO is the first commercial
> computer, it beat UNIVAC I to market by several months. Lyons Brothers,
> Elliot Automation, English Electric, Marconi, ICT, and GEC are all related,
> not to mention ICL. In 1969, Marconi, GEC, Elliot Automation, and English
> Electric merged to form Marconi Elliot Computer Systems Ltd., which kept
> selling the various dissimilar lines (there is some mention of AEI also
> being a part of this). In 1970 or 71, the company became known as GEC
> Computers Ltd., and some parts (I don't know what ones for sure), were
> combined with ICT to form ICL. Basically, GEC Computers Ltd. was all of the
> real-time systems, and ICL was all the data-processing systems. Somehow
> Lyons Brothers fits into this picture also, I'm just not sure how. ICL was
> first bought by an English electronics company called STC plc in 1984, then
> Fujitsu bought 80% of ICL in 1990. Later Nortel bought STC and then in 1998
> Fujitsu bought the other 20% of ICL from Nortel. As a side note, Fujitsu
> also owns all of Amdahl, having excercised their option to buy the rest of
> the company, since as you probably know, they put up the money to start
> Amdahl and as such always owned a large chunk of it. I think GEC has
> subsided back into Marconi, but I'm not sure, the whole ICL and GEC story is
> a huge mess really. I hope you don't mind me taking the chance to give you
> more info about them than you probably wanted. BTW, I know Elliot Brothers
> (later Elliot Automation) dates back to 1795, and I'm fairly sure some of
> the other companies involved are that age or older. If anyone has more info
> I'd like to hear it, I have info on a bunch of models of
> ICL/GEC/Elliot/English Electric machines too. I'd most like to know more
> about ICT...
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M. K. Peirce
Rhode Island Computer Museum, Inc.
215 Shady Lea Road,
North Kingstown, RI 02852
"Casta est qui nemo rogavit."
- Ovid
Received on Thu May 04 2000 - 20:38:50 BST