For DATAR, Ferranti-Packard (then still known as Ferranti Canada) built an experimental computer to share information among ships in a convoy.
Although the prototype was a success, the failure rate of the vacuum tubes was a concern to everyone and Ferranti suggested they re-build the machine using transistors instead.
DATAR ran out of funds before this conversion could take place, but Ferranti put the experience to good use in a series of one-off transistorized machines.
Ferranti initially had high hopes for the machine, thinking that it would be successful in Europe if sold by the UK headquarters' sales staff.
As had happened many times in the past, however, the UK computer team suffered from a terminal case of not invented here, and decided it was better if they designed their own instead.
Ferranti-Packard was unwilling to simply let the development effort go to waste, and started looking for ways to commercialize the ReserVec hardware into a general purpose mainframe.
When newer transistors were introduced at lower price points, interest in magnetic amplifiers disappeared almost overnight.
[3] Orion ultimately demonstrated that the neuron concept simply didn't work at larger sizes, the electrical current needed to activate the switching was high enough that when pushed through the long wires of a large machine they produced noise in the circuits and no solution could be found to eliminate it.
Harriac was essentially a transistorized Pegasus with more modern features, and as such, it would have fit into Ferranti's product line at about the same level as the Orion.
Although this technique eliminated the need for storing a list of memory blocks, it was at the cost of expensive copies every time a program ended.
The system included 64 hardware channels that could be connected to peripherals of any sort and could be supplied with a wide variety of core memory sizes.
The prototype machine was later greatly expanded into the largest FP-6000 installation and sold to Saskatchewan Power, the provincial electrical supply crown corporation for use in performing both engineering calculations and customer billing simultaneously.
Over the next year they sold one to the Defence Research Establishment Atlantic, in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia and the other to the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX).
They initially entered discussions with International Computers and Tabulators in early 1963, but ICT looked at the continual losses and was less than interested.
However, the FP-6000 offered them a more attractive system that could be scaled with the addition of smaller and larger machines to produce an entire line.