Groupe Bull (also known as Bull Computer or simply Bull) is a French computer company based in Louveciennes, France, outside Paris. The company has also been known at various times as Bull General Electric, Honeywell Bull, CII Honeywell Bull, and Bull HN. Bull was founded in 1931, as H.W. Egli - Bull, to capitalize on the punched card technology patents of Norwegian engineer Fredrik Rosing Bull (1882–1925). After a reorganization in 1933, with new owners coming in, the name was changed to Compagnie des Machines Bull. The tower of a personal computer (specifically a Power Mac G5). ... A company in the broadest sense is an aggregation of people who stay together for a common purpose. ... The Eiffel Tower has become a symbol of Paris throughout the world. ... 1931 is a common year starting on Thursday. ... The punch card (or Hollerith card) is a recording medium for holding information for use by automated data processing machines. ... Norwegian engineer Fredrik Rosing Bull (1882–1925) was the inventor/designer of improved punched card machines, based on which resulting patents French multinational computer corporation Groupe Bull was founded in 1931. ... 1933 was a common year starting on Sunday (link will take you to calendar). ...

The company has undergone many takeovers and mergers since its formation. In particular, it has had various ownership relations with General Electric, Honeywell, and NEC from the 1960s to the 1980s, and Motorola and France Telecom more recently. It acquired Honeywell Information Systems in the late 1980s, and later also had a share of Zenith Data Systems and Packard Bell. Groupe Bull was nationalised in 1982 and was merged with most of the rest of the French computer industry. In 1994 the company was re-privatised. This page deals with the combination of two companies into one. ... The General Electric Company, or GE, (NYSE: GE) is a multinational technology and services company. ... Honeywell (NYSE: HON) is a major American multinational corporation that produces electronic control systems and automation equipment. ... NEC Corporation is a multi-national information technologies company headquarterd in Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan. ... Motorola (NYSE: MOT) (TYO: 6686) started as Galvin Manufacturing Corporation in 1928. ... France Télécom is the main telecommunication company in France. ... Packard Bell was an American radio manufacturer, founded in 1926, that later became a defense contractor and manufacturer of other consumer electronics, such as television sets. ... Nationalization is the act of taking assets into state ownership. ... 1982 is a number and represents a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar Events January January 6 - William Bonin is convicted of being the freeway killer. January 8 - AT&T agrees to divest itself of twenty-two subdivisions January 11 - Mark Thatcher, son of the British Prime... 1994 was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International year of the Family. ... Privatization (sometimes privatisation, denationalization, or — especially in India — disinvestment) is the process of transferring property, from public ownership to private ownership. ...

Bull is particularly present in the public sector, banking, finance, telecommunication and industry sectors. As of 2005, the company's distribution and consulting network is present in over 100 countries. The public sector is that part of economic and administrative life that deals with the delivery of goods and services by and for the government, whether national, regional or local/municipal. ... 2005 is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

Recent major products of the company are the scalable Bull NovaScale family of Itanium 2-based servers and the high-availability Bull Escala family of IBM Power5-architecture servers. Bull also has a mainframe computer range (catering to long-time customers with Bull computer installations) and a blade server line. All new products are available with a distribution of Linux as an option. The Itanium 2 is an IA-64 architecture microprocessor developed jointly by Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Intel, introduced on July 8, 2002. ... In computing, a server is: A computer software application that carries out some task (i. ... POWER5 dual-MCM POWER5 quad-MCM POWER5 is a microprocessor developed by IBM. POWER5 consist of 8-cores in the quad-MCM package. ... Mainframes (often colloquially referred to as big iron) are large and expensive computers used mainly by government institutions and large companies for mission critical applications, typically bulk data processing such as censuses, industry/consumer statistics, ERP, and bank transaction processing. ... A blade server is essentially a housing for a number of individual minimally-packaged computer motherboard blades, each including one or more processors, memory, storage, and network connections, but sharing the common power-supply and air-cooling resources of the chassis. ... Tux, a penguin, is the official Linux mascot. ...

External links

• Groupe Bull corporate website (http://www.bull.com/)
• Bull's history (http://febcm.club.fr/febhista.htm) – By the Fédération des Equipes Bull (Federation of Bull teams); also includes descriptions of Bull's products over the years