Fujitsu looked at the UK National Lottery and saw a cash cow, so bought ICL.
I’m not in the business but know a good deal when I see it. So apparently did Fujitsu.
ICL had a longish history when that deal was done, that goes back to the days of punched cards to program a computer. Good stuff in it’s day.

There had been one previous abortive effort to modernise the Post Offices 19th century rubber stamp business practices, and I can’t comment further on that.

After a short contract with the Midland Bank I attended an interview and was awarded the post of Technical Design Authority (TDA) for the Post office project at ICL Pathway in Feltham.
The existing ‘design’ documents amounted to no more than ‘wordy’ wish lists. The authors, some of whom I met, were familiar with client-server technology and damn-all else. My conclusion, a collection of ICL dinosaurs, that should have been extinct fifteen years before.
The coding team were mostly Visual Basic ‘programmers’, sporting MCP badges. (Microsoft Certified Professional) Experience with them demonstrated that they couldn’t have programmed their way to escape from a paper bag.
There were two teams that were exemplary, that of Configuration Management, and the Security Team.
The pilot scheme was running and there were a large number of problems, I asked Configuration Management for access to their ‘fault’ stack and gave advice on fixes. One idiot in the coding team had specified the name of the Post Office printer, rather than using the default. A replacement printer didn’t work. The fundamental issue was communications with the Post offices The software was proprietary, and I was disallowed from reviewing it. A visit to the manager of this debacle and my statement to him that my title of TDA was a stupid joke, was dismissed. I did not renew my contract.

Previously I cooperated with Epson on the development of the FORTH programming language on their laptop. This was with Japanese engineers.I could not fault their knowledge or co-operation.
It grieves me that it is always Fujitsu’s name that is constantly mentioned. The only mistake they made was buying ICL, and the bunch of no-hopers that worked for it.