Lyons, Elliot, GEC, ICL, et al.

[Will Jennings]

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...
________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com