All General Electric and Honeywell Mainframe Lineage

This group covers a single continuous mainframe design that passed from one manufacturer to another. General Electric built the GE-600 series beginning in 1963 from technology it had developed for military projects, a family of 36-bit machines best remembered for the advanced operating systems that ran on it, including the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System and the research that led toward Multics. When General Electric sold its computer division to Honeywell in 1970, Honeywell continued the same machine as the Honeywell 6000 series, an integrated-circuit development of the earlier GE hardware that kept the same 36-bit word size, and manufactured it from 1970 until 1989. The two names therefore describe one manufacturer lineage split by a corporate acquisition rather than two unrelated machine families.