Looking back on 83 years of history… Atos has just announced a friendly takeover bid for Bull. In over 80 years, Bull’s history has been more than eventful, with a merger with General Electric, a nationalization and then a privatization of the company. A brief reminder of the key periods and dates of one of the pioneers of information systems. 1931: a European genesis Bull was founded in 1931. Initially, the company marketed statistical machines called tabulators.
This was the era of punched cards
European companies saw them as an alternative to usa phone number data the products of the American IBM (International Business Machines). Bull’s shareholders were French, Swiss and Belgian. The CEOs were recruited from among the officers of the French army. The company owes its name to Fredrik Rosing Bull, owner of the patent for punched card sorters in 1921.
At the time this Norwegian engineer was
looking to speed up the decision-making process of heeled ankle boots are a must-have this fall certain Scandinavian insurance companies. From 1927, the Belgian Émile Genon owned the rights to the Bull patents, but sold them to the Swiss Oscar Bannwart, who built the first Bull machine in 1929. Manufacturing was transferred to Paris the same year. From World War II to the early 1960s: the glory days In 1940, Bull developed the first electronic calculators. And in 1960, the company was ranked ninth French company on the Paris Stock Exchange.
“Bull was then the second largest computer crawler data manufacturer in the world and the number one in Europe,” AFP specifies. It saw itself as a bulwark against American hegemony in information processing. This was the era of the Cold War. The French company sold its equipment to the Soviet Union, China and Japan. It practiced free machine loans and correctly managed the launch of new generations of equipment by slowing down sales.
Having joined the company in 1936, Joseph Callies was CEO from 1948 (or 1949) to 1964. He developed social paternalism to take advantage of the talent of each employee. From the 1960s to the early 1980s: the American period Gone are the days of tabulators and punch cards, and instead came electronics, computers with their memory and storage units. Announced in 1957, but launched in 1961, Gamma 60 was the first multitasking computer (capable of running several programs at the same time). But, too complicated to use, it failed to make a breakthrough. It was the IBM 1401 that won the day. In the years 62 and 63, the share price and profits collapsed.