In a surprising turnabout, Compagnie des Machines Bull SA, which has increasingly sourced all its largest mainframes from NEC Corp in Japan, is to build the next generation machine for both companies at its Angers plant. The switch seems to suggest that NEC, which just signed to market the top-end Unix servers made by Hewlett-Packard Co (CI No 2,598), believes that attrition in its Japanese mainframe base is set to accelerate rapidly. The new 36-bit machines for the GCOS 8 market, will be the first top-end models for that market built in CMOS, and Bull’s research and development contribution will be some $40m, and it will do the work at Les Clayes and at the old Phoenix, Arizona base where Honeywell Information Systems used to build the ancestors of the planned new machines. They will implement Bull’s extended Distributed Processing System architecture and are due to be ready at the end of next year. NEC will contribute engineering resources for co-operative development with Bull on the design and implementation of these systems. NEC will contribute the technology used in the Parallel ACOS Series successors to the 32-bit mainframe line – DPS 7000s in Bull parlance, and will also implement its ACOS-6 operating system to run on the new machines. They succeed the DPS 9000/900 line for Bull and the System 3700 and 3900 for NEC. NEC hopes to sell about 80 of the new computers in Japan over the three years from December 1996.
