ICE Felix

Founding and license manufacturing

ICE Felix was founded in 1970 to manufacture electronic systems based on imported licenses. In its founding year, the company acquired licenses from the Dutch firm Friden and the French Compagnie internationale pour l'informatique (CII).^[2] It also maintained long-term cooperation agreements with American companies including Ampex, Pertec, Data Products, and Centronics.

Romania's independent path

Unlike the other Comecon states, Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu pursued a largely independent technology policy.^[3] Cooperation with the other Comecon countries in computing remained limited.^[3] Romania joined the Unified System (ESER) in 1973,^[4] but continued to develop its own computer family at ICE Felix in parallel, based on Western licenses rather than the IBM System/360 architecture that underpinned the ESER programme. The Felix C mainframes were architecturally derived from the French IRIS computers of the CII, which in turn were based on the American SDS Sigma 7.^[5][6]

Expansion

From the mid-1970s, ICE Felix began manufacturing mini- and microcomputers. The Felix MC, a microcomputer based on the Intel 8008 developed in 1974 at the Politehnica University of Bucharest, was among the earliest microcomputers in the Eastern Bloc. The CORAL minicomputer series was based on the PDP-11 architecture.

From the mid-1980s, home computers of the HC series were added, based on the ZX Spectrum and produced for approximately ten years.^[7] ICE Felix also manufactured IBM PC-compatible systems (Felix PC) and the CoBra, another ZX Spectrum-compatible home computer.

After 1989

After the fall of the Iron Curtain, ICE Felix established partnerships with international companies including IBM, Advantech, Sun Microsystems, DEC, Logitech, and Hewlett-Packard. Like the rest of the Eastern European computer industry, however, ICE Felix was unable to compete with Western manufacturers.^[8]

In March 2008, the company sold several plots of land and buildings in the Pipera district of Bucharest for 6 million euros.^[9] The company was 45.68% owned by the Authority for State Asset Recovery (AVAS), 23.58% by Felix IT, and 12.23% by the investment fund SIF Oltenia.^[9] In 2004, ICE Felix employed approximately 200 people;^[10] revenue in 2006 was approximately 3.1 million lei.^[9]