Vendor lineage
Honeywell
A thermostat company that became a mainframe company and then went back to controlling physical things.
Mark Honeywell founded the Honeywell Heating Specialty Company in Wabash, Indiana in 1906. The other half of the lineage is older still: Albert Butz had formed the Butz Thermo-Electric Regulator Company in 1886 to commercialise a device that opened and closed a furnace damper on its own, and that business became the Minneapolis Heat Regulator Company. The two merged in 1927 as Minneapolis-Honeywell, and for its first fifty years the company's business was regulating temperature.
**Then it became a computer company, which most people have forgotten.** It entered through a 1955 joint venture with Raytheon, bought out its partner, acquired Computer Control Corporation in 1966, and through the 1960s was one of the manufacturers collectively nicknamed **Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs** - IBM being Snow White. As the field thinned to five the survivors were renamed after their initials: Burroughs, UNIVAC, NCR, Control Data and Honeywell. **The BUNCH.**
**In 1970 it bought General Electric's computer division, and that is the transaction that matters here.** It rebranded the GE-600 mainframes as the Honeywell 6000 series - and it inherited GE's ongoing operating system project, **Multics**.
**Multics is the reason this entry exists on a site about networks and systems.** It was an enormously ambitious timesharing system, and it set the standard for what such a system should do about security in particular - rings of protection, access control on segments, the idea that a machine shared by mutually distrustful users needs the operating system to enforce that distrust. Its influence on **Unix** is not a matter of vague inheritance: the name Unix was coined in deliberate contrast to it. Every Unix-derived system in use today, including the ones this site's tools run on, is downstream of an argument about Multics.
Honeywell also became a serious force in storage. Its joint venture with Bull and Control Data, Magnetic Peripherals, was the world leader in fourteen-inch disk drives through the 1970s and early 1980s.
**And then it left.** It merged its computer operations with Bull and NEC in 1986, sold the division outright to Groupe Bull, and by 1991 was out of the computer business entirely. In 1986 it had bought Sperry Aerospace - a piece of a fellow BUNCH member - and turned back toward avionics and control systems.
**The 1999 transaction is worth stating precisely, because it is usually said backwards.** AlliedSignal acquired Honeywell, and then took the Honeywell name for itself, because the name was worth more than its own. The acquired company's brand survived the acquirer's.
What it does now closes a circle. Honeywell builds industrial automation, building control and aerospace systems - which is to say it is once again in the business of controlling physical things, having spent thirty-five years in the business of computing them. **And it is an investor in Nozomi Networks**, which appears on this timeline for monitoring the security of industrial control systems. A company that spent the 1970s running the operating system that taught the industry about protection domains now funds the people watching its own controllers for intrusions.
1970 General Electric's computer division
GE's mainframe business, rebranded as the Honeywell 6000 series.
Honeywell Information Systems - and custody of the Multics project, whose design shaped Unix and therefore most of what came after.
GE's process control business followed separately in 1974.
1975 Xerox Data Systems
The Sigma line, which had a small but committed customer base.
Absorbed into Honeywell's range; the CP-6 operating system descended from this side of the house.
1986 Sperry Aerospace Group ~$1.03B
Bought from Unisys - which is to say, from the merged remains of two other BUNCH members.
The foundation of Honeywell's modern avionics business.
- Britannica: the lineage back to Albert Butz's 1886 thermostat company, Mark Honeywell's 1906 founding, the 1927 merger, and the 1934 acquisition of Brown Instrument
- Computer History Museum: entering computing via the 1955 Raytheon joint venture, buying Computer Control Corporation, acquiring GE's computer division in 1970 and with it Multics - which set the standard for timesharing systems, particularly on security - then Honeywell-Bull in 1986 and exit by 1991
- Kiddle/Wikipedia summary: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the BUNCH, the GE-600 rebrand as the Honeywell 6000 series running GCOS, Multics and CP-6, Multics' influence on Unix, and Magnetic Peripherals leading fourteen-inch disk drives
- Wikipedia: Honeywell 6000 series - manufactured 1970 to 1989, sold to Groupe Bull in 1989
- Honeywell's own history: AlliedSignal acquiring Honeywell in 1999 and electing to retain the Honeywell name for its brand recognition, with the headquarters moving to Morristown
- HRAC Arizona timeline: the 1974 purchase of GE's process control business which became the Process Solutions division, the 1986 Sperry Aerospace acquisition at $1.029B, and the 1991 sale of Honeywell Information Systems to Bull