"Roger" wrote in message
k...
The message
from Douglas de Lacey contains these words:

AEI was taken over by GEC some years before GEC took over English
Electric. The EECo takeover would have been somewhere around 1967.


Not quite.


Memory fades and I had forgotten that the 2 takeovers were so close
together.

AFAICS none of you have mentioned EELM for which a friend of mine
worked. Or was that just an internal name?

That abreviation didn't ring any bells so I did a quick google and found
the following quote (at zdnet.co.uk) in an article headed "Alas poor
ICL, we knew it well..."

"I actually worked for ICL, once. It was before it was called ICL; I had
a job as a programmer for English Electric Leo Marconi Computers (EELM)
in 1965".

Part of a sad tale of the ruination of the British computer industry.

--
Roger Chapman

Once upon a time .... I worked in the nascent 'British Computer industry
.....
there was a huge ... huge... programme to update the UK's Air Traffic
Control and ancillary systems ; -
'There'll be SST (Concord(e)s; Konkordskii plus the US SST - not to mention
the hordes of Soviets Mig 25 et.all. swarming all over the airspace ...
it'll be beyond the power of unaided man to comprehend (let alone control)
.... something must be done!'

At that time nobody (aka Government) really knew who would be a winner so
the Government made 'each way' bets. Any and every man-boy-and-dog with
access to a soldering iron and the nous to connect two OC92 together and
call it a 'bit store' instead of the more formal 'Eccles-Jordan bistable'
could get a development contract for the super-project. Soon, Plessey,
Elliots, Ericsson, Marconi, AT&E, ICT et.al, had little bits of the overall
project .

Acting in the 'white heat' of the 'Technology Revolution' the (then) Post
Master general - or was he Minister for Technology by then ? (one forgets) -
sallied forth each week from the Ministry of Technology (MillBank) to a
secret location and had a meeting with HighGalumphers from at least two of
the involved companies and strove to make 'em 'team-up' (aka merge).
Different weeks, different Highgalumphers, different merging .
Out of these shenanigans, ICL was borne ... Plessey ceased to manufacture
computer-systems ... whatever happened to EELM?

Meanwhile, away from the centralised control of the Minister of Technology
....
[It's not the Viscount Stangate - it's not Anthony Wedgwood Benn - call me
Toney!]
... in Sunnyvale ... . The rest, as they say, is history.

Had to dodge any Concordes lately? Cynic! Moi?

--

Brian