The first mentions of Hughes Dynamics, including Help Wanted ads for positions within the company and speaker notices for a seminar on data retrieval, began appearing as early as July 1962 in newspapers in Louisiana and Texas.
[9] The central computer facilities were acquired from the firm C-E-I-R and consisted of IBM 360 mainframes in the Miracle Mile area.
[8] The core business of the parent company, Hughes Tool, was the manufacture of drill bits for wells and associated products and services.
[12] Gay said, "Creation of the new subsidiary ... is an important step forward in Hughes Tool Company's broad diversification program.
[18] In terms of acquisitions, in April 1963, the Electrada Corporation sold its Advanced Information Systems unit to Hughes Dynamics.
[19] The Advanced Information Systems group specialized in non-numerical computing and, led by engineer John A. Postley, had developed a file management program, originally called GIRLS (the Generalized Information Retrieval and Listing System), that had gone through several refinements and at this point was called Mark II and Mark III and largely sold to the municipal government sector.
[24] The acquisition was certainly in place by early November 1963, when help wanted ads declared the credit firm to be a division of Hughes Dynamics.
[25] Hughes Dynamics acquired Tellertron, a real-time transaction processing system for savings banks that was owned by Stone Laboratories, in November 1963.
When Jean Peters, Hughes' wife, went to have lunch at the restaurant, one of the eatery's staff members told her how happy they were that her husband's company would be sharing the floor with them.
[28] Authors of a more conspiratorial bent, such as Carl Oglesby, have worked Hughes Dynamics into their greater narratives, such that it was intended to eventually compete with IBM and represented part of a long-running contest for power between Northeastern and Southwestern elites.
[29] In any case, after the immediate results from being in the computer services field for what seems to have been less than two years proved to be poor, someone within the Hughes organization decided to exit the business.
[17] News articles describing cuts at Hughes Dynamics began appearing as soon as March 1964, with reports that as many as half the company's employees had been let go.
[31] Postley of the Advanced Information Systems unit later told the story of what happened from his perspective:[21] Then one day I got a phone call from a guy at Hughes headquarters who said, "We're terminating the company.
[3]) Datamation magazine reported around mid-1964 that the firm was shifting its emphasis from software to hardware, and at that point, only 10 percent of Hughes Dynamics employees would likely remain with the company after all of these moves were complete.
[22] In August 1965, Hughes Dynamics, which by that point had acquired 41 percent of Dashew Business Machines' stock, infused it with some funds to keep it going while in reorganization.
[35] Dashew later said that the relationship with the Hughes organization had been the worst experience of his business career, adding with a dry wit, "The chances of successful partnership are lessened when the principal partner is inaccessible.