History
The company's eight founders worked as a team at the Toronto division of Ferranti, Ferranti-Packard, which sold numerous 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. In 1964 Ferranti sold off its computing division to International Computers and Tabulators, which almost immediately closed the Toronto office. Ian Sharp, the chief programmer, decided to found his own company, and named it for himself.
The company started with contract programming on IBM System/360 series mainframes, and to some degree took over Ferranti's former military work. It became particularly well used by the Canadian Navy, setting up smaller offices in the main Navy bases in Victoria, BC and Halifax. Ted McDorman and Jim McSherry were lead players in this. 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. IPSA and STSC jointly developed their software. branding it separately as Sharp APL and APL*Plus. Initially, IPSA served STSC's customers from its Toronto datacenter. After STSC built its own in 1972, they provided disaster recovery for each other: if one of the datacenters couldn't function, the other datacenter would accommodate both vendors' users.
Read more about this topic: I. P. Sharp Associates
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