Before the allied signal deal Honeywell bought the GE computer systems group. The large GE computers were HQ'd in Phoenix. They operating system was GCOS or GECOS. they also had Multics running on the GE machines.
Honeywell also bought XDS primarily for their PL1 compiler.
I’m sitting in a building built by Honeywell in Phoenix in 1980. I hired on at this facility in 1974 to work on the GCOS 3 OS and HW.
I worked with some of the Xerox engineers after the take-over.
We migrated GCOS 3 to GCOS 8 in the late 1970’s. GCOS 8 included new-fangled features such as “virtual memory” and “segmentation”. For several years, I was the plant instructor on the new hardware architecture as well as my design duties. My students included all the new hires in SW and HW.
I just installed a GCOS 8 system on a hardware emulator which is hosted on a RHEL 6 Linux system hosted on a KVM virtual machine on an Intel based hardware platform designed and built by Bull, a French company.
Yes, Honeywell was one of the Seven Dwarfs, and acquired the remains of the others, becoming known as the Used Computer Company. I think Honeywell sold out to France’s Bull.
PL1? It never really went main stream.
In school, we went from Fortran to Pascal. Everybody learned Fortran because practically all computer companies had to provide it if they wanted to sell to the US Gov at the time.