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The activity said to occur when yet another bigiron merger or buy-out occurs; reflects a perception byhackers that these signal another stage in the long, slowdying of the mainframe industry. Also described as"elephants mating": lots of noise and action at a high level,with an eventual outcome in the somewhat distant future.In its glory days of the 1960s, it was "IBM and the SevenDwarves": Burroughs, Control Data, General Electric,Honeywell, NCR, RCA, and Univac. Early on, RCA soldout to Univac and GE also sold out, and it was "IBM and theBUNCH" (an acronym for Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data,and Honeywell) for a while. Honeywell was bought out by Bull.Univac in turn merged with Sperry to form Sperry/Univac,which was later merged (although the employees of Sperrycalled it a hostile takeover) with Burroughs to form Unisysin 1986 (this was when the phrase "dinosaurs mating" wascoined). In 1991 AT&T absorbed NCR, only to spit it outagain in 1996. Unisys bought Convergent Technologies in1988 and later others.More such earth-shaking unions of doomed giants seeminevitable.[More dates?]