In early 1956 the Army Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth released a contract tender for the development of a van-mounted mobile computer as part of their Fieldata efforts.

By automating the process of routing the messages in the middle of the information flow, the Signal Corps was hoping to guarantee delivery and improve responsiveness.

Sylvania's director of development speculated that the Army's terminology in the contract may have hidden the apparent wonderful opportunity.

In the end, RCA and Sylvania entered bids, along with a number of smaller companies with unproven track records.

By this time the Army had expressed increasing interest in the concept and had ordered four additional machines and associated software, including a COBOL compiler.

[4] MOBIDIC B was supplied to the Army's Tactical Operations Center and featured dual CPUs for increased reliability.

[6] 7A's service entry was delayed due to the failure of the Army-supplied tape drives, but Sylvania replaced these with off-the-shelf commercial units and the system went operational in January 1962,[7] the first off-shore deployment.

[8] The 7A unit was extremely successful in operation, cutting the time needed to order and deliver spare parts dramatically.

It was so successful that the MOBIDIC D was diverted to the Army's 3922nd Ordnance Supply Control Agency in Orléans, France (Maison Fort) to replace the existing RAMAC 305 card system.

[7] MOBIDIC's success, independent of Fieldata's failure, led to additional Army contracts for the smaller AN/APQ-32 computers, which processed artillery radar data.

For instance, a large supply depot might have numerous warehouses for different sorts of materials; MOBIDIC could route incoming requests by examining the part number and then sending that message to a particular tape.

MOBIDIC replaced many manual steps; it performed the collation lookup, sorting the data, and collecting all the printed messages for delivery.

[12] An add required 16 microseconds, a multiply or divide 86, these slow times a side effect of its serial operation.