De la logique câblée au calculateur industriel. Une aventure du Laboratoire d’Automatique de Grenoble by M. Deguerry and R. David (review)

The issue of research-industry collaboration became an obsession in the 1960s for many European planners, who compared the barriers to innovation they perceived in their countries with the American model. Partly for this reason, success stories have been rare in the French computer industry. This book narrates one of them, a case of fruitful technology transfer from a university to a private company during the heyday of the minicomputer.

An electrical engineer from the Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble (Grenoble Polytechnic Institute), René Perret had devoted his doctoral dissertation to the regulation of large electricity transport networks and had spent six months at Howard Aiken’s computing laboratory in Harvard and at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, DC. Perret understood the need for expertise and training in emerging fields like regulation, servo-mechanisms, and automatic control. In 1958 he created a servo-mechanism team within the university’s Applied Mathematics Laboratory and then in 1962 established his own Laboratoire d’Automatique de Grenoble (LAG)—an acronym that could not be misinterpreted in French. Perret maintained close relationships with international figures in this field, such as Winfrid Oppelt from Darmstadt, or Yasundo Takahashi from Berkeley who came as visiting professor to the University of Grenoble.

The development of the laboratory for automatic control followed the same process model as the one observed in computer science.¹ It attracted students, who eventually completed doctorates while working as assistants and could undertake applied research projects. Its resources came from contracts with private industry, nationalized companies, and government agencies as well as from the Ministry of Education. This generated revenue and new research topics as well as practical experience in cooperating with firms.

Among various industrial partners, the Battelle Institute in Geneva employed Perret as a consulting engineer and entrusted his laboratory with the design of a calculator, Alpac (Analogue & Logic Process Automation Computer).

In Grenoble the Mors company, a venerable automobile maker that had converted to manufacturing railway signals and automatic systems, established a joint research team with LAG in the Polytechnic Institute. This team was sponsored by DGRST, a new government agency that had recently been set up specifically to support research-industry collaborations. The first outcome was a family of digital modules designed at LAG, using resistor-transistor logic (RTL) and marketed as Logimors.

In 1963, two of Perret’s doctoral students were assigned the task of designing a small industrial computer under contract with Mors. The book vividly describes the project and its constraints, the growing research team, the technological choices, the experience gained with laboratory mock-ups, and the many efforts still needed to transform the latter into a rugged machine able to work in chemical or mechanical plants. With all due qualifications, the MAT01 could boast being the first computer based on ICs developed and marketed in France, perhaps even in continental Europe. Mors presented it in October 1965 and, over the next three years, sold a modest 20 units, gaining 15 percent of the French market for this class of machines, in competition with DEC PDP-8 and other computers from various French makers. The authors devote a useful chapter to the first clients—for example, the MAT01 processed data for the stress tests of the Concorde supersonic airliner and was used to control the regional power grid in Naples, Italy. The MAT01 was marketed in 1965, and its designers defended their doctoral theses six months later. Accordingly, the authors remark that it was a rare example of a negative time lag between invention and innovation!

Because demand grew faster than Mors’ investment capability, the computer and automation division was sold to another established firm in the same field, Télémécanique. Télémecanique used the MAT01 to diversify its offer and then developed a whole family of minicomputers based on TTL technology. Their commercial success...