What was the Bulls management attitude towards Multics?
Bull-General Electric was very enthusiastic when Multics was initially announced in 1965. But the long infancy of this operating system decreased the interest of initial prospects. The 1966 crisis of the whole GE-600 line reinforced the Bull’s management feeling that the most profitable part of the business was the world of business applications where customers were committing their company for a minimum of 10 years of fruitful contracts. Specially after Honeywell took over, the GCOS product line was focused towards this bread and butter target. Multics remained an experimental system done by and for scientists. When French educational and engineering accounts were brought by CII merger, then Multics started to enter the Bull’s market and many orders were secured. But Phoenix failed to produce a Multics version of the bad famed DPS88 system and NEC processors took over. NEC had not been licensed to Multics, probably because it had been financed by DARPA money. The changes to the DPS-90
