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As chance would have it, Levy had recently been fired by ITT and was hired by Turnbull. He set up the small in-house Electronics Laboratory with the promise of having a prototype machine ready for testing in three years. In early 1953 he visited companies looking for potential development partners, and through this process he met with Arther Porter, head of R&D at Ferranti Canada.
At the time, Ferranti was in the midst of developing the [[DATAR]] system for the [[Royal Canadian Navy]]. DATAR was a [[vacuum tube]]-based [[drum memory]] computer that stored and collected data for display. Radar and sonar operators on any of the ships in a convoy could send contact reports to DATAR using a [[trackball]]-equipped display that sent the data over a [[UHF]] [[
Porter suggested using the DATAR computer design as the basis for a sorting system. Following Lewis' suggestion, a new reader would sort the mail on the basis of the pattern of stripes on the letter provided by an operator who simply typed in the address without attempting to route it. Ferranti suggested a fluorescent ink instead of a conductive one. Routing information would be placed on the magnetic drum, which could store thousands of routes and could be easily changed on demand. Levy, however, was interested in using an optical memory system being developed at IBM by a team including [[Louis Ridenour]] (see [[Automatic Language Translator]] for details) for storage of the routing information. Turnbull overruled Levy, and on 10 August 1954 he signed a contract with Ferranti for the '''Electronic Information Handling System''' using a drum memory.<ref>Vardalas, pg. 114</ref>
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