Dan Humblot joined Bull in November 1962 and left in May 2001, spending his entire career in design and leading the development of the Distributed Processing System 7 (DPS 7). President of the Fédération des Équipes Bull (FEB) since 2015, he now shares his views on the federation's mission and on the pivotal role played by the Angers factory in Bull's history.
How did the Fédération des Équipes Bull begin?
The FEB dates back to the time when Honeywell-Bull was formed, followed by the 1981 nationalisation, which brought together many entities into the Bull group. Jacques Stern and Francis Lorentz had great difficulty bringing the teams back together and recreating the "esprit maison", the strong sense of belonging and shared identity that defined Bull.
To help rebuild that spirit, the company sponsored a sailing boat named L'Esprit d'Équipe. This was not a commercial initiative. It was an internal project intended to unite employees around a shared goal. At the time, there were 70 offices worldwide, and each one had a team following the race. The boat went on to win the Whitbread Round the World Race, with skipper Lionel Péan receiving the trophy from Lady Diana. These support teams went on to form the Fédération des Équipes Bull.
What is the deeper mission of the federation?
Above all, our mission was to preserve these machines. We later extended that mission to documents, archives, accounting records, commercial documentation, schematics, advertising campaigns, and posters. What we did not know how to do at the time, and what you are doing today, was to interview the people who made Bull's history before they leave us. As they say in West Africa, "when an elder dies, it is a whole library that burns."
What word best sums up the spirit of the FEB?
A sense of belonging, pride and solidarity. We started with 500 members and now have 70. But people stay loyal to us until death, illness, or entering a retirement home. For me, as president of this association, that is a source of great satisfaction, if not pride.
What was the working atmosphere like at Bull?
When I joined in 1962, we received three months of training on relay machines and tabulators. This let every new employee discover all the different trades: maintenance, design and sales. It created a real "esprit maison", what everyone called "la Maison Bull" or the "Bull family". That sense of belonging is one reason I later became so involved in the FEB.
What does the current Bull renaissance mean to you?
It is a real source of pride. It is happening again. For the FEB, this is an opportunity to invent a new structure to carry the mission forward. Two things remain fundamental: continuing to record the personal accounts of former employees about product design, workplace culture and management and convincing successive leadership teams of the absolute importance of preserving this industrial memory.
What role did the Angers factory play in Bull's history?
The Gamma 60, a large mainframe computer launched in the mid-1950s after the success of the Gamma 3, grew into an oversized and overengineered machine, eventually occupying 200 to 300 square metres per unit. Management failed to rein in the engineering team, and since most orders came from the French state, the project also depended on political decisions. When state support was withdrawn, Bull was left with excess stock and had to scrap it at a heavy loss. Only five or six machines were built instead of the planned 20 and the company had to move quickly to design a more compact replacement.
To recover, Bull negotiated with RCA, the United States electronics and computing company, to obtain the plans for the RCA 301 mainframe computer. The Angers factory took on the project. At the time, there were no standard cabinets, so everything had to be built from scratch, including the cabinets. The Angers teams converted the original measurements from inches to the metric system and built the machine in record time. It became the Gamma 30, which restored the company's financial strength.
Angers' second achievement was the Gamma 10, the first Bull machine to sell more than 1,000 units. It was developed quickly and sold so well that it worried IBM. On two occasions, the Angers factory helped Bull recover from a crisis.
Through periods of success and crisis, this ingenuity helped shape Bull’s history. The FEB continues to preserve that legacy today.
