English Electric
More info
- Released
- 1918–1968
- Type
- Industrial conglomerate
- Successor
- ICL
A British industrial giant that built locomotives, jet aircraft and some of the country's most important early computers before it all got merged into ICL.
Founded in 1918, English Electric was best known for heavy electrical plant and military aircraft. Its computers came by way of the National Physical Laboratory: DEUCE (1955) was a production version of the Pilot ACE, built on Alan Turing's design, and around thirty were sold. The KDF9 (1964) had a stack-based architecture that was unusually elegant for its day.
In 1963 it took over the computer arm of LEO — the tea-shop company's machines — and in 1967 bought Elliott-Automation. A year later its computer business was merged with ICT to form ICL, the government's attempt at a British counterweight to IBM. The rest of the group was swallowed by GEC.