Unlike SAGE, FIELDATA was intended to be much larger in scope, allowing information to be gathered from any number of sources and forms.

Much of the FIELDATA system was the specifications for the format the data would take, leading to a character set that would be a huge influence on ASCII a few years later.

Another part of the FIELDATA project was the design and construction of computers at several different scales, from data-input terminals at one end, to theatre-wide data processing centers at the other.

Several FIELDATA-standard computers were built during the lifetime of the project, including the transportable MOBIDIC from Sylvania, and the BASICPAC and LOGICPAC from Philco.

The direct successor to the UNIVAC 1100 is the Unisys 2200 series computers, which used FIELDATA (although ASCII is now also common with each character encoded in 1/4 of a word, or 9 bits).