Honeywell
Datamatic Corporation
A US company known for its mainframes and operating systems.
The company's history is long and tortuous, with many mergers, acquisitions and name changes. A company formed on 1886-04-23 to make furnace regulators eventually merged in 1927 with another company formed in 1904 by a young plumbing and heating engineer named Mark Honeywell who was perfecting the heat generator.
A 1955 joint venture with Raytheon Corp., called Datamatic Corporation, marked Honeywell's entry into the computer business. Their first computer was the D-1000. In 1960 Honeywell bought out Raytheon's interest and the name changed to Electronic Data Processing (EDP) then in 1963 it was officially renamed Honeywell Inc.
In 1970 Honeywell merged its computer business with General Electric's to form Honeywell Information Systems. In 1986 a joint venture with the french company Bull and japanese NEC Corporation created Honeywell Bull. By 1991 Honeywell had withdrawn from the computer business, focussing more on aeropspace.
CII Honeywell was an important department. Honeywell operating systems included GCOS and Multics.
See also: brain-damaged.