Léanord

~ the obit ~

A government deciding which computers go into the country's schools is a thing that happened in France in 1985 and never happened anywhere I was sitting. Léanord sat on the supplier list that decision paid out to. The full name was Laboratoire d'Electronique et d'Automatisme du Nord and the address was Haubourdin, just outside Lille. The national register has the company created on 25 December 1960 as a subsidiary of Creusot-Loire. For most of its first two decades it did industrial electronics and automation, which is what the name says.

Computers started in the late 1970s and they started small. A Picolog 8 built around the Intel 8008 and a Picolog 80 around the 8080 both appeared in 1977. The Silex followed in 1978 and the Sil'z in 1979, the same year as a teaching machine called the Picodidac 80 on the 8085. The Sil'z is the one that sold.

The Sil'z line ran to four numbered generations by 1983 and then jumped architectures. The Sil'z 16 of 1983 was an Intel 8088 at 4.77 MHz with 128 KB, running MS-DOS and CP/M-86. It came wired for a classroom network called the Nanoréseau and was sold against the French state's plan to put computers in front of its pupils. By 1986 the catalog had moved to the Challenger Elan series, 16-bit ISA backplane machines you could order with anything from an 8088 to a 386.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ an apple ii motherboard under a french badge ~

The Silex of 1978 was sold as one complete desk system and that is what made it notable: a box, a disk unit, a keyboard and a screen, together for 29,000 francs. Inside was a licensed Apple II motherboard with a 6502 at 1 MHz and 32 KB of RAM. Léanord had bought the right to build somebody else's design and badge it as French, which in 1978 was a reasonable way for a regional electronics firm to get into microcomputers in one step.

The Sil'z the following year dropped the Apple lineage for a Zilog Z80 at 2.5 MHz with 64 KB and CP/M compatibility. That is the machine the company iterated on, with a Sil'z II in 1981 and a III the year after, then a IV with a hard drive in 1983. A French school or a French office at the start of the eighties had a domestic CP/M option, and it was built in Haubourdin.

~ the nanoreseau years ~

Informatique Pour Tous was announced in 1985 and it put computers in front of French pupils at national scale. The Sil'z 16 was wired for the Nanoréseau, the classroom networking standard the plan ran on, so Léanord was selling into the one procurement that mattered, alongside Thomson and the others. Two years after the plan was announced the company was sold.

~ forty percent of the turnover ~

Léanord was bought in November 1987. Eighteen months later, in May 1989, Siemens France paid £3.6m for 51.7% of Intertechnique Informatique, better known as IN2, and built IN2 Groupe Siemens out of IN2 and Léanord together. English Wikipedia puts the company's end at 1989 and says it merged with Intertechnique that year, which does not quite line up with a November 1987 purchase followed by Siemens taking IN2 in May 1989. Either reading leaves the same thing standing afterward, which is a product line inside somebody else's French subsidiary rather than a company.

What that subsidiary looked like is on the record thanks to a CBR report of 1 February 1990, reading off 01 Informatique. Léanord's personal computers were 40% of the group's turnover and IN2's systems were the other 60%, four fifths of those running Pick. The managing director, Christian Fayard, had moved the year-end to 30 September to line up with Munich, and the nine months to that date showed a loss of £12.5m on a turnover of £70m. Consolidated turnover to 31 December 1989 was £106.4m against £109.5m the year before. Nixdorf Computer France was waiting to be folded in on top, pending a competition ruling.

~ struck off in 1995 ~

The legal entity outlasted the badge by six years. SIREN 460 501 539, Haubourdin, closed on 29 September 1995 with its administrative state set to C. There is also a LEANORD registered in Moirans in 2022 doing financial activities, and that is a name being reused rather than anything coming back. English Wikipedia files the company as defunct in 1989 and names Siemens-Nixdorf as where it ended up, and the gap between that year and the register's 1995 is the ordinary gap between a brand being retired and a form being filed.

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