There may well be readers of CBR who have never heard of a computer company called ICL. It now of course forms part of the global electronics, telecoms and engineering giant Fujitsu – along with other blasts from the computing past such as Amdahl and others who have long since been absorbed into its multi-national folds.

For those of you who do remember ICL, it was of course, prior to its 2000 takeover, the UK’s biggest ‘national champion’ provider; itself ironically made up of bits and bobs of older British tech companies, it was created artificially in the 1960s as the island nation’s answer to, er, IBM. (That bit sort of didn’t work out.)

Teasing aside, ICL was a big part of the UK ICT landscape and as recently as 1999 was supposed to be de-merged to become a FTSE listed UK stalwart, though basically that was because no-one in Japan was paying attention to what the then CEO was telling the press and as soon as they did, a corporate assassin was dispatched, kind of thing.

In its day, ICL racked up some very impressive achievements in mainframe, mid-range and even desktop/’micro’ computing (the OPD, anyone, or the DRS family?). Its kit still powers major government departments like HMRC and DWP (it was huge in the public sector) 20 years on, as it were; and as part of Fujitsu itself, the former ICL is still with us as Fujitsu Services.

All this came to mind as last week ICL’s parent celebrated its 75th anniversary, as it started in 1935. The firm took the opportunity to boast it is the largest Japanese employer in the UK and Ireland (11,500 employees) (and £2bn revenue), has a track record of innovation stretching back to the early days of telephone switching in the 1930s, mainframe and parallel computing generation of the 1970s, to more recent inventions such as palm vein authentication and the world’s first 3D PC (I don’t know what that could mean either, but it sounds cool, right?).

It also claims to be the first company in Europe to have a Tier III certified data centre, and recently won the UK’s largest desktop and thin client outsource deal with the Department for Work and Pensions. Globally, it is ranked by Gartner as the world’s third largest IT services provider based on total revenue, has 170,000 people on payroll in 70 countries, and reported revenues equivalent to $50bn for its last financial year.

All impressive stuff, but when we spoke to Fujitsu’s global CTO Marc Silvester we were less interested to be honest in the start of the Fujitsu story in rebuilding the telecommunications infrastructure in Japan after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 and more about the ICL side of the legacy – and its future.

Should ICL have gone it alone and tried to IPO? "I’ve been here 21 years and seen all sorts of attempts at structures but I genuinely think this is the best one," he says. "We don’t work on any kind of Japan-centric, top-down approach, though we have a very Japanese culture – we are very collaborative, assets based approach, where different geographies can share expertise and project load very easily. I think that preserves our achievements and also means we are part of a company with huge penetration into many different markets, from fibre optics in exchanges to vehicle control systems in cars, which means we have the potential for a great future, too."

Yes, that future is Cloud-shaped – but not necessarily Internet-centric. Silvester talked to us of highly granular sensor and equipment at all levels and in new markets that IT hasn’t made it into yet, like agriculture, powered by massive social media.

Well, we’ll see. But ICL/Fujitsu has survived and surely is in better shape now than it would have been if it really had tried to make life in a post Dot Com Bubble deathscape work. Or as he puts it, "The future is about a living, breathing IT infrastructure where change is going to become much more rapid and predictable."

That kind of fighting talk may not have been heard – or allowed – much in the old Putney ICL HQ, I’ll warrant.