France: Victory for the Bull

To the Euromart, the Eurodollar and the Eurochick (the rising class of smart young working girls), a French firm with the un-Gallic name of Machines Bull has just added another contribution: the Eu-rocheck. Ready to switch to the magnetic-ink system of automatic checking now spreading throughout the U.S., European nations have been looking around for the best system. To many, it seemed that the firm likeliest to walk away with the biggest fistful of orders was IBM, whose sales in France alone were up 41% last year. But scrappy Machines Bull has soundly tweaked the giant’s nose. Virtually every country in Western Europe has now picked the Bull system over the method used by U.S. banks and championed by IBM in Europe.

Chauvinism undoubtedly played its part in the choice, particularly on the part of French bankers, but the Machines Bull method has definite advantages over the U.S. system. The U.S. method, which uses machines that are built by General Electric, National Cash Register and Burroughs Corp. as well as by IBM, electronically “reads” the numbers formed by magnetic ink on the check. To conform to the machines’ peculiar reading habits, numbers must be printed in distorted characters that the human eye finds hard to read, and a smudged printing job can occasionally trick the machines.

Machines Bull’s method is to form the numbers with a series of thin vertical lines, which the human eye finds easier to read. Bull’s machine then interprets the number through a Morse code-like system that notes the number of lines and the varying widths of spaces between them but makes no attempt to determine the actual shape of the numeral. It immediately rejects any check that shows a flaw in the “dot-dash” code. Machines Bull’s system is simpler and cheaper to buy ($12,000 for basic equipment for a small bank) than the system that IBM was pushing.

Ever since the 19303, Machines Bull has been aggressively trading punch cards and crossing calculators in a hotjduel with IBM, has so thrived on the struggle that its sales have gone from $7,000,000 to $68 million in 1962. The company took its name from Norwegian Inventor Fredrik Bull, whose patents it acquired to make its first punch-card machine; it is now controlled by the Callies family (paper mills). It turned out a tabulator that was for years the fastest on the market, brought out the first computer to use compact germanium diodes as well as tubes and developed a Gamma 60 computer so electronically marvelous that it can handle scores of totally unrelated problems at once.

Winning the Eurocheck gives the company a head start over all other computer makers, but the company agreed to make the patents on its system available to all comers to induce Europe’s banks to accept its system. Already IBM, National Cash Register and Burroughs plan to copy Machines Bull’s system.