The company's founders worked as a team at the Toronto division of Ferranti, Ferranti-Packard, which sold many products to the Canadian military and large businesses.
The team worked on operating system and compiler design for the company's range of mainframe computers, the Ferranti-Packard 6000.
At one point IPSA could claim to have played a part in every computer system onboard Canadian Navy ships.
In the early years, IPSA collaborated with its sister company Scientific Time Sharing Corporation (STSC) of Bethesda, Maryland, USA, each retailing the same services in their respective countries.
Packet-switching also made their transatlantic links much more usable, since on previous equipment, frequent "line hits" would produce user-visible errors.
[4] I. P. Sharp Associates offered timesharing users access to a variety of databases, plus sophisticated packages for statistical analysis, forecasting, reporting, and graphing data.
All of these were available from the 39 MAGIC workspace, an easy-to-use time series, query, and reporting language, which among other things featured integrated high-quality business graphics from Superplot.
Roger Moore, a company co-founder and vice-president, won the 1973 Grace Murray Hopper Award for the development of APL\360 (along with Larry Breed and Dick Lathwell).
IPSA employed a team of expert APL implementors and contributors at its head office in Toronto: including Ian Sharp, in his role as enabler, Roger Moore, Dick Lathwell, Brian Daly in his role as marketing guy in Ottawa, Bob Bernecky, Leigh O. Clayton, Doug Forkes, Dave Markwick, and Peter Wooster.
The term "Zoo" is attributed to a visitor from The Establishment who witnessed the long hair, beards, and unconventional dress of some in the team.
Later, in the 1980s, a branch office in Palo Alto, California, managed by Paul L. Jackson, made significant contributions to APL and later J.
Initially, the presence of the IBM PC posed little threat to the timesharing industry as the computing power and storage capacity offered by these small machines was insufficient.