Important engineers on the project included Fred Brooks and Gerry Blaauw.

Despite some technical successes, the project became a political football, amid IBM's search for a unified product line.

The components identified were: The 8103 was proposed as a low-end processor "to relieve the larger systems of the series from the tasks associated with input-output processing."

It featured a full complement of instructions for fixed and floating point arithmetic and storage-to-storage character operations.

[4] The 8106 was to have been the principal processor in the 8000 line, designed to bracket the performance of the IBM 7090 system.

[5] The 8108 was an "attachment to the 8106 machine" designed to greatly improve the performance of floating-point arithmetic.