I remember reading about this, but info on the Web is scarce.
It concerns a failed effort (in the mid-1970’s) of electronics giants Philips and Siemens, to enter the mainframe computer business.
The story I heard was that the european parliament was concerned about IBM’s monopoly in large computers. It was decided that a European consortium would be set up (like Airbus) to challenge IBM. Philips and Siemens were selected to be the prime contractors. So agreemenst were signed, and product designed.
As I understand it, the venture proved to be a costly failure-largely because it came at a time when mainframes were being challenged by mini computers (from firms like DEC, Data General, Wang, etc.).
As an anecdote, I worked for Philips in the 1980’s0ne day I stumbled upon a cabinet filled with plastic modules-these were the so-called "universal logic modles) made by Philips for the computer. After the debacle, Philips tried to market these devices to other computer manufacturers. What they were were integrated digital circuits, that could be wired up externally, to make shift registers, counters, etc. As far as I know, these things never sold as well.
Does anybody have specific info on the ill-fated mainframe computer venture?
Searching for “Unidata” may help you find more info.
Unidata was a joint venture by Philips (Netherlands), Siemens (Germany) and CII (France). It was exactly as you said, an attempt to counter IBM’s dominance, at least in European markets. Phillips was going to do the smaller computers, and Siemens and CII would do the medium and larger computers. These different size mainframes would all run the same software, which was seen as crucial to competing with IBM.
The downfall of the mainframe due to folks like DEC probably did factor into it, but Unidata had management problems right from the start. Their overall goal was pretty clear, but ironing out all of the details was painfully slow and inefficient. You had three different companies and three different governments all involved. It was a political and organizational nightmare.
What really seemed to do them in though was that CII merged with Honeywell-Bull. This seemed like it was giving the Americans a clear shot into the European market through something that was supposed to be entirely European, so Siemens and Philips booted CII out of Unidata. After this, Unidata still had the Dutch government backing them, but they didn’t have much support in the German government. Philips got frustrated, and it wasn’t long until Unidata pretty much fell apart.
When I worked at Siemens in the 90s we used the BS2000
Interesting. DEC had something similar a bit earlier. I did a class project in which I did a paper implementation of a CDC 6600 with them in 1973. It was a good idea which finally caught on when integration was good enough to make these of reasonable complexity. I did a lot of work on testing programmable logic devices (PLDs) in the late 1980s where they were heavily used in AT&T switches, and today FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) are a very big product.
Philips has always been pretty advanced in stuff like this.