Crossword-Solution: HONEYWELL 9 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 18

RCA and GE sold out early, and it was `IBM and the Bunch' (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, and Honeywell) for a while.

Honeywell was bought out by Bull; Burroughs merged with Univac to form Unisys (in 1984 --- this was when the phrase `dinosaurs mating' was coined); and as this is written (early 1991) AT&T is attempting to recover from a disastrously bad first six years in the hardware industry by absorbing NCR.

Other OS groups at Honeywell began referring to it as `God's Chosen Operating System', allegedly in reaction to the GCOS crowd's uninformed and snotty attitude about the superiority of their product.

All this might be of zero interest, except for two facts: (1) The GCOS people won the political war, and this led in the orphaning and eventual death of Honeywell {{Multics}}, and (2) GECOS/GCOS left one permanent mark on UNIX.

GCOS later played a major role in keeping Honeywell a dismal also-ran in the mainframe market, and was itself ditched for UNIX in the late 1980s when Honeywell retired its aging {big iron} designs.