LEO (1950)

I think you mean "FASTRAND"--and probably a FASTRAND II or III. A great hulking movable-head mass storage device that was being used in the Univac line long after the competition had moved to disk. Basically a couple of nickel-plated sewer mains in a fluorescent- lighted box. I wondered if the box would flip over if the bearings on one of the drums suddenly seized up. I encountered one sometime around 1970 on the newly-installed 1108 system at IIT in Chicago. Situated in a converted storefront on Michigan Avenue, truck traffic rumbling by and shaking the old building would cause the FASTRAND to hiccup with errors. Sperry Univac must have offered the college a heckuva deal on the installation. It replaced a S/360-40 setup that turned in years of good performance. I could not imagine an installation going from 8 bit characters on a 32-bit machine to 6 bit characters on a 36 bit system, with lousy drum printer output (instead of a 1403) to boot. Cheers, Chuck