ICL

» see icl.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

A mainframe company's real product is paperwork. ICL spent three decades printing the British state, and the way you met a machine like that was by receiving something it had produced. I never touched one. Almost nobody who lived under one ever did.

It was assembled in 1968, not founded. The Industrial Expansion Act gave Tony Benn, then the Minister of Technology, the instrument to merge International Computers and Tabulators with English Electric Computers, which was itself a fresh merger of Elliott Automation into English Electric Leo Marconi. Everything still standing in British computing went into one box. The government took just over ten percent of the equity and put research money behind it.

The point of the exercise was stated openly. Britain wanted a manufacturer large enough to sell against IBM, and it was willing to buy the output itself until that was true. The 1900 series went into the public sector under a preferential purchase arrangement that meant departments did not have to put the work out to tender. For most of the seventies, if you were dealing with a British government office, you were dealing with an ICL machine at the other end of it.

In April 2002, when the name finally came off the door, I was eighteen and connecting from Turkey through a modem that had nothing to do with any of this. ICL's entire life happened above the layer I could see, which is true of nearly all of the computer industry before the web. That is why a company that once employed thirty three thousand people is now a name that lands on almost nobody.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the national champion ~

The arrangement worked for about twelve years, which is longer than most industrial policy survives. Employment peaked at thirty three thousand in 1980. There was a hardware line that went from the 1900 series through the System 4 range and into the 2900 Series, and above it sat VME, an operating system ICL wrote itself and kept writing for the rest of its life.

Owning the whole stack was the strategy, not an accident of it. A customer who bought ICL bought the processor and the operating system from the same supplier and stayed there, because moving was expensive enough that nobody did it casually. That is a good business right up until the moment somebody sells a cheaper machine that runs software from everywhere.

~ the decline ~

The 2900 Series shipped in October 1974, roughly two years behind schedule, which is a long time to be late in a market where the competition ships annually. The government had already put a forty million pound loan in during the 1970 downturn to keep the research program alive. By 1981 the finances were bad enough that Unisys moved to take the company over and the government blocked it, which tells you the national champion was still national and no longer a champion.

Headcount went from thirty three thousand in 1980 to twenty thousand by 1985. Series 39 was a genuinely good machine, running optical fiber between its parts years before that was ordinary, and it did not matter. The market ICL had been built to fight was already being lost by IBM too, to the same beige boxes, and neither of them had a plan that involved being smaller.

~ the actual end ~

Standard Telephones and Cables bought ICL on 10 September 1984, on the theory that computing and telecommunications were converging and a company that did both would be worth more than two that did one each. The theory was correct and the timing was not. In 1990 STC sold eighty percent of ICL to Fujitsu for about 1.29 billion dollars, and the British computer industry became a Japanese subsidiary that still had a British name on it.

The name lasted another twelve years on momentum. Nokia's computer division was bought in 1991, which took turnover to around two billion pounds against twenty one thousand employees. Fujitsu became sole owner in 1998, and in 1999 the hardware business went into the Fujitsu Siemens joint venture with the VME mainframes held back. What was left was a services company, and in April 2002 it was renamed Fujitsu Services. Nothing shut down that day. There was simply no longer any reason to keep calling it ICL.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »