WASHINGTON, Oct. 16,Reuter: The United States has tentatively approved the sale to India of a super computer, one of the first such offers of high technology to a country outside Western Europe, the State Department said today.
But department officials said India had not yet decided whether to buy the computer from one of the US firms or from a Japanese company.
The officials said India planned to use the super computer to analyses weather patterns to help predict monsoons.
They said, however, that before any USS sale could be made, India would have to assure the United States that the computer would be used only for the stated purpose and the technology would be protected from illegal use.
Previously, the officials said, the only non-western sale of a super ‘computer, distinguished generally from lesser computers by its greater speed in calculating and its larger memory, had been for very limited uses.
They cited a sale to Saudi Arabia for use only by the Arabian American oil company Amoco for petroleum exploration.
U S. firms interested in the sale of the computer, worth 2030 million dollars, ate Control Data Corp. and Cray Research Inc.,, both of Minneapolis.
The officials said the sale would come under an umbrella memorandum of understanding covering the transfer of US. High technology signed by the United States and India in 1984.
They said the first major sale under the pact was agreed to earlier this year, It was for the sale ‘of an IBM computer, worth about 7 million dollars to India’s Oil and Natural Gas Corp. for seismic data interpretation.
Article extracted from this publication >> October 31, 1986
