Federal Screw Works

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

When I first saw the name “Federal Screw Works” pop up on Bitsavers, I
thought it was some kind of tongue-in-cheek computer company name (cf
Softare Toolworks, Solid State Music, Technical Magic, Thinking Machines,
Trantor, Mt Xinu, Foonly, Jacquard Systems etc).

But no, it really is a company that does what it says in its name, making
screws and other machine parts, right to this day.

The reason they are on Bitsavers is because, for a brief time, they owned
a division called “Votrax”, which designed and made speech-synthesis
chips. This was later spun off as a separate company, which now no longer
exists.

[Alfred Falk]

When I first saw the name “Federal Screw Works” pop up on
Bitsavers, I thought it was some kind of tongue-in-cheek computer
company name (cf Softare Toolworks, Solid State Music, Technical Magic,
Thinking Machines, Trantor, Mt Xinu, Foonly, Jacquard Systems etc).
But no, it really is a company that does what it says in its name,
making screws and other machine parts, right to this day.
The reason they are on Bitsavers is because, for a brief time, they
owned a division called “Votrax”, which designed and made
speech-synthesis chips. This was later spun off as a separate company,
which now no longer exists.

Yup! We had one at U Alberta on a PDP-11/45 running UNIX, installed in 1974
or 1975.