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International Computers Limited

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International Computers Limited

International Computers Limited (ICL) was a British computer hardware, computer software and computer services company that operated from 1968 until 2002. It was formed through a merger of International Computers and Tabulators (ICT), English Electric Computers (EEC) and Elliott Automation in 1968. The company's most successful product line was the ICL 2900 Series range of mainframe computers.

In later years, ICL diversified its product line but the bulk of its profits always came from its mainframe customers. New ventures included marketing a range of powerful IBM clones made by Fujitsu, various minicomputer and personal computer ranges and (more successfully) a range of retail point-of-sale equipment and back-office software. Although it had significant sales overseas, ICL's mainframe business was dominated by large contracts from the UK public sector, including Post Office Ltd, the Inland Revenue, the Department for Work and Pensions and the Ministry of Defence. It also had a strong market share with UK local authorities and (at that time) nationalised utilities including the water, electricity, and gas boards.

The company had an increasingly close relationship with Fujitsu from the early 1980s, culminating in Fujitsu becoming sole shareholder in 1998. ICL was rebranded as Fujitsu in April 2002. Fujitsu (UK) as the hardware and software supplier has been implicated in the British Post Office scandal, which has extended from the 1990s to the 2020s

The ICL brand is still used by the former Russian joint-venture of the company, founded in 1991.

International Computers Limited was formed in 1968 as a part of the Industrial Expansion Act of the Wilson Labour government. ICL was an initiative of Tony Benn, the Minister of Technology, to create a British computer industry that could compete with major world manufacturers like IBM; the formation of the company was the last in a series of mergers that had taken place in the industry since the late 1950s.

The main portions of ICL were formed by merging International Computers and Tabulators (ICT) with English Electric Computers, the latter a recent merger of Elliott Automation with English Electric Leo Marconi computers, which itself had been a merger of the computer divisions of English Electric, LEO and Marconi. Upon its creation, the British government held a 10% stake in the company and provided a $32.4 million research-and-development grant spread across four years.

ICT was itself the result of a merger of two UK companies that had competed with each other throughout the 1930s and 1940s during the punched card era: British Tabulating Machine Company (BTM) and Powers-Samas. ICT had thus emerged with equipment that would process data encoded on punched cards with 40, 80 or 160 columns, compared to the 64 or 80 columns used by IBM and its predecessors.

In 1962, ICT delivered the first ICT 1300 series computer, its first transistor machine and also the first to use core memory. A small team from Ferranti's Canadian subsidiary, Ferranti-Packard, visited the various Ferranti computer labs and saw their work on a next-generation machine. On their return home they quickly produced the Ferranti-Packard 6000, developing the machine, compilers and an operating system (before these were common) and putting it on the market by 1963. A feature of the Executive operating system was its ability to multitask, using dynamic memory allocation enabled with a magnetic drum as an intermediate random access device. The machine went on to have some success and sold in small numbers in Canada (Saskatchewan Power Corporation retired serial number 0004 in early 1982) and the United States.

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