I worked for Sperry Univac 1974-79, in Halifax, Montreal and Calgary. I was an "SA", Systems Analyst at the service of the Sales team. It was a lot of fun. The Univac salesmen were the cowboys that didn't fit in at IBM. When preparing benchmarks, money was no object, we had lavish expense accounts. In the Oil Patch I saw $100K deals signed during coffee break.

One of Univac's problems was the proliferation of operating systems for the different incompatible architectures. There was Exec 8 for the premier 1100 series (36-bit); OS/4, OS/3, OS/7 and later VS/9 (formerly RCA's TSOS then VMOS) for the 9000 series (32-bit); also the 418 and 494 real-time OS'es (18-bit words). Then there was the CADE 1900. All written in Assembler of course. We even had Varian in the branch, with salesmen from the different product lines competing for business.

All this duplication resulted in overhead and squandering of programmer resources.

After the Burroughs merger, the joke was that UNISYS stood for "Univac is Still Your Supplier".