Laboratory for Electronics (LFE)

LFE was a Boston-based electronics firm that had an interest in ferromagnetics. They produced a drum memory for commercial markets and attempted, in the early 1950s, to capitalize on this by creating systems that would use it in inventory control. Their LFE Guestron machine was a special purpose (non-programmable) relay-based machine but proved inflexible when it came to anything except the more elementary inventory situations.

In the later 1950s, they produced a prototype computer under contract with ICL in Britain but this “Diana” project was cancelled in 1958. They produced at least two other storage systems (RASTAC and RASTAD) that were meant to be high capacity random access peripherals to other computers, but these too were unsuccessful.