"Post Office firm Fujitsu has major £19m Government contract renewed"
Fujitsu flood helpline: "Good morning. How can I help you today?"
Flood victim: "My house has flooded and I never received a flood warning from you."
Fujitsu: "I'm sorry to hear that. No other customers have reported flooding due to adverse weather. Are you sure you didn't leave the bath tap running?"
Victim: [sobs]
@hesgen Fujitsu is throughly embedded in the UK public sector because government policy through the seventies and eighties favoured ICL. In buying ICL, Fujitsu was buying encumbent status across the entire sector at exactly the time that sector desperately needed IBM compatible PCs which they manufactured abroad. The need to maintain legacy mainframe systems, whether in native mode or through emulation on newer hardware, keeps them locked in tight.
@christineburns @hesgen hmm. Hardware was being phased out by ICL late 80s, they did make PCs and a failure OPD/BT Tonto. Main frame used Fujitsu core. The parent company STC was bought by Canadian NT ( Nortel Networks) who then sold off chunks of the group. Fujitsu got a systems company that was getting out of hardware. I worked for ICL and Nortel at the time. Nortel went into voluntary liquidation in 2008.
@hesgen @JohnLoader6 The ICL PC was originally an 8085 CP/M Rair Black Box with a respray. The next gen was a 8086 box that ran Concurrent CP/M 86 — not IBM compatible (I was tech director of a company that sold them). The DRS300 was similarly based on Concurrent CP/M — not that you could really call that a PC. IBM compatible architecture capable of running off the shelf apps didn’t come until just before the takeover.
@JohnLoader6 @hesgen On the mainframe side, the second generation of 29xx VME machines were microcoded (2970/80 were hardwired logic) so VME lent itself to emulated running as a VM under Unix or to running Unix as a VM under VME, just as IBM moved to running 1960/70 operating systems on other hardware by emulation. So 3900 systems had a migration path Fujitsu hardware, which I think sealed the logic of the takeover. They didn’t have to inherit the legacy stuff to keep the base
@hesgen @JohnLoader6 System 25 was a microcoded replacement of System 10 — business transaction system inherited from Singer, but which cannibalised 2903/4 and ME29 sales with a rival solution that didn’t fit with anything else. Mitel PABXs had no integration story. The 8800 word processor was a government compelled acquisition from another unsuccessful enterprise and clashed with the ICL-developed word processor on 7501. The DRS 40/50 was developed 3000 miles away by ex Singer
@hesgen @JohnLoader6 engineers who’d worked on the 1500 and came to market with barely working mainframe comms. The IBM protocols worked long before CO1/2/3. In fact CO3 was still not working reliably when I left ICL. The 9500 point of sale systems were overengineered to the point of farce.
@hesgen @JohnLoader6 A funny story. I had an OPD on trial for my company in 1983 - compatible with nothing except the phone. I left it at home on a table in the lounge one day and there was a break-in. The thieves took other tech but left the OPD untouched. I kind of admired their taste.
@christineburns @hesgen but nobody remembers the Mitsubishi Apricot a very similar device but used industry standard software.
