What are the origins of Bull-NEC relationship?
The relations between NEC and Bull start at the time of the take-over by Honeywell of the General Electric business. Compagnie des Machines Bull had Mitsubishi Office as distributor in Japan, that imported one Gamma 60. General Electric had Toshiba that was a licensee of GE for a variety of products including computers. Honeywell had Yamatake for control systems and had licensed Nippon Electric for computers. This set of license agreements concluded by Japanese companies had been engineered at the end of the 50s by the MITI. When the industry shake-out occurred around 1970, MITI “recommended” also merges in the Japanese industry and Toshiba transferred its mainframe computer business to NEC. NEC negotiated with Honeywell its license agreements that cover the whole set of computers including the Honeywell-Bull Level-64. When CII-HB was created in 1975, the new products of that company did not belong to the scope of agreements (e.g. network architecture, DPS-7…). The control of the Hon
