The Rise and Sale of the General Electric Computer Department: A Further Look

1058-6180/00/$10.00 © 2000 IEEE 53 In 1994, the General Electric (GE) Computer Department Alumni Association held its triannual meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona. This was the opportunity to interview a number of the pioneers of the Electronic Recording Machine Accounting (ERMA) project and those who continued to embellish GE’s capabilities in computer design and manufacture until the merger with Honeywell Information Systems in 1970. From that alumni meeting grew the contents of a special issue of the Annals published in 1995. Following that publication, the authors of this report participated in a correspondence that involved several GE alumni. Shortly after the publication of the special issue, Homer (Barney) Oldfield, the originator of the GE Computer Department and ERMA entrepreneur, published a book on the subject.8 While there was an excellent correspondence between the two publications based on close cooperation between all the authors, there still remained some differences that were primarily based on perceptions. This article is an attempt to resolve some of those issues or at least to provide the two sides of some issues.