[1] Its main competitor in Europe was the IBM 360/50, which, like the Iris 50, was a universal 32 bits mainframe suitable for both business and scientific applications.

[1] At the same time that the CII was building the Iris 50, it had to study military variants for the army called P0M, P2M, and P2MS.

[2] The Iris 35 M version, used in particular to process the information needed to fire the Pluton missile, had a magnetic core memory made up of elements of 16 kilobytes each; tolerant of severe environmental conditions.

It then decided to adopt the Sigma 9 architecture for the Iris 80, inspired by the Sigma 7 and marketed by Société européenne de traitement de l'information [fr] (SETI), one of the three companies that had merged in 1966 to create CII.

[2] Its successor, the Iris 80, was considerably transformed and improved, both in terms of the components, which moved from DTL to TTL,[2] and the operating system (Siris 7/8) on which the IRIA researchers worked to increase its speed.