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The Sperry Rand Corporation

Amalgamating amalgams

These two highly bureaucratic corporations were, themselves, built out of prior mergers, and it is therefore not at all surprising that Sperry Rand was among the largest of companies in the USA from the time of its formation. This project was valuable enough and difficult enough that it made the company’s competitor to the 1401 regrettably late to market, but LARC is impressive when we consider the time of its design and manufacture. This was followed a year later with the 1108A which could support three CPUs, four memory banks offering up to 262K of 38bit words, two programmable I/O controllers, and a math coprocessor called the UNIVAC Array Processor.

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