Compagnie des Machines Bull

Fredrik Rosing Bull worked at the Storebrand insurance company in Oslo and in 1919 patented a punched card sorter and tabulator different enough from Hollerith's to avoid infringing it. He died of cancer in 1925, aged 43. The patents passed via the Swiss firm H.W. Egli to a French investor group, which founded Compagnie des Machines Bull in Paris in 1931.

Bull became the continent's only serious alternative to IBM. Under the occupation René Carmille used its machines for the French census and is credited with deliberately never processing the column recording religion; he was arrested in 1944 and died at Dachau. The post-war Gamma 60 (1958) was technically bold and financially ruinous, General Electric took control in 1964, the French state nationalised the firm in 1982, and Atos bought what remained in 2014. The name still appears on French supercomputers.