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by m-i-l·8y ago·view on hn ↗
Interesting to see Ferranti mentioned a couple of times: "the Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first commercially available general-purpose computer" and "Tim Berners-Lee was the son of an engineer who worked at Ferranti". Ferranti were a pioneer in early computing, a huge employer in the part of Scotland in which I grew up, and were very respected and successful for a long time. Unfortunately they came to a very tragic end after expanding into the US, buying a company called International Signal and Control, which turned out to be a front for the US government's illegal sales of arms to right wing dictatorships, with entirely fabricated accounts (i.e. non-existent profits), and they went bankrupt as a result[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferranti

1 comments
Perhaps the most well known product of Ferranti for a somewhat younger generation of computer enthusiasts is the infamous "ULA" chip in the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.