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Your support makes all the difference.B is for BUNCH. In the days when mainframes ruled the earth - around the Seventies - IBM was the biggest computer company in the world, and wasn't worried about letting everyone know it. To Wall Street analysts, following the computing market meant watching IBM and the "Bunch" - an acronym for the other US companies that trailed in Big Blue's wake. (IBM mainframes were coloured blue; hence the name.)
In the bunch, B was Burroughs; U was Univac (actually Sperry-Univac, but that would have spoilt the acronym); N was NCR; C was Control Data Corporation; and H was Honeywell.
We know where IBM is now: struggling to make sense of a world where the desktop PC can do more than the most powerful mainframes of those times. It undermined its pre-eminence in hardware by trying to cash in on the late Seventies PC boom, when it bought in an operating system from Microsoft rather than - as was standard IBM operating procedure - developing it itself. Somebody at IBM didn't follow the company motto, THINK, quite hard enough. Bill Gates out-thought them, and Microsoft is now the biggest computer company in the world, although it doesn't make any hardware.
What of the Bunch? Well, Burroughs and Sperry-Univac merged in 1986 to become Unisys; NCR was bought in 1990 by the US telecoms giant AT&T; in 1992, CDC split itself into Ceridian Corporation and Control Data Systems; Honeywell is still Honeywell.
Are they still the Bunch? Not really. Software companies have taken over a world where hardware is a commodity, rather than the raison d'etre for giant companies. The Wall Street analysts don't even try to come up with an acronym for such a fast-changing environment.
Some might mourn the passing of the Bunch. But don't forget that if things hadn't changed, you would be trying to surf the Net on a time-shared mainframe and cursing the wasted hours while you waited for it to react. So perhaps things haven't changed that much.
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