Honeywell 1904
Mark Honeywell started his company, the Honeywell Heating Specialty Co. in 1904, a heating business. In 1927 it merged with the Minneapolis Heat Regulator Company to form the Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator Co. and began to produce, among other things, high quality jewelled clocks. With the onset of WWII, the company invented the electronic autopilot, which turned out to be critical to the US war effort.

In 1955 the company made its first foray into computing, with the D-1000. This machine weighed 25 tons and cost $1.5 million. Honeywell is one of the companies that was involved in the earliest days of the Internet. The first Information Message Processors (IMP) was developed by BBN on a Honeywell DDP 516. 1963 saw the company formally change its name to Honeywell Inc. and develop instruments for the first moon landing.

Honeywell acquired GE’s computer business and customer base in 1970, merging its computer business to form Honeywell Information Systems. Their key market was mainframe computers. With the emergence of the PC in 1986, the company embarked upon a joint venture with NEC and Compangie des Machines Bull of France. Slowly it withdrew from the computer business, and now focuses on its more traditional field of automation control, sensors and activators. It is the world’s leading integrator of avionics systems for aircraft.