I worked for Sperry Univac 1974-79, in Halifax, Montreal and Calgary. I was an "SA", Systems Analyst at the service of the Sales team. It was a lot of fun. The Univac salesmen were the cowboys that didn't fit in at IBM. When preparing benchmarks, money was no object, we had lavish expense accounts. In the Oil Patch I saw $100K deals signed during coffee break.

One of Univac's problems was the proliferation of operating systems for the different incompatible architectures. There was Exec 8 for the premier 1100 series (36-bit); OS/4, OS/3, OS/7 and later VS/9 (formerly RCA's TSOS then VMOS) for the 9000 series (32-bit); also the 418 and 494 real-time OS'es (18-bit words). Then there was the CADE 1900. All written in Assembler of course. We even had Varian in the branch, with salesmen from the different product lines competing for business.

All this duplication resulted in overhead and squandering of programmer resources.

After the Burroughs merger, the joke was that UNISYS stood for "Univac is Still Your Supplier".

There is a very well written history of the US navy's first shipboard computer system.

https://ethw.org/First-Hand:No_Damned_Computer_is_Going_to_T...

The article shows up here fairly regularly. I mainly bring it up as the computer was developed by Sperry, and it really is a good read about an early tech project.

The founder of Sperry Corp is this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmer_Ambrose_Sperry who has an incredible dossier of inventions to his name and his son Lawerence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Sperry was an aviation pioneer and inventor who invented the first guided missile, autopilot, and much more, as well as being accredited to starting the "Mile High Club". I'm reading the Elmer Sperry biography currently and its incredible how many projects they worked on in such a short span. Makes you question how productive we are in the computer age...

The quadrate Sperry logo is cool. It was giving me Saul Bass vibes, but I looked it up and it was from Gerald Stahl Associates. I don't have JSTOR access but would like to read this if I did: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/002224296402800102 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1249219

Also really love that Varian Data Machines logo. Down-Up-G with Up interrupted (iykyk) https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Varian_Data_Machin...

I've been familiar with the Sperry logo for about 50 years, but only because dad had bought a New Holland combine in late 1969 that sported the Sperry New Holland logo. It wasn't until more recent times that I learned the company was a conglomerate engaged in diversification but primarily known for large computers.

New Holland went through a few iterations until being purchased by the Fiat group. It is a part of CNH with its sister company of Case IH.