There was some further development and planning, but in 1959 TCA placed a $2 million ($12 million in year-2000 dollars) contract for a deployment system consisting of 350 transactors and all the communications equipment to support them in the field. Ferranti also won the contract for the computer system itself, although IBM had also been considered. The new machine was based on a 25-bit word, using one bit for parity checking and 24 bits for data, and was equipped with 4,096 words of core memory, later expanded to 8,192 words. Storage consisted of five magnetic drums (one was a spare) with 32,768 25-bit words each, and six tape units. Simple load balancing software routed requests across two CPUs, known as Castor and Pollux, the computer as a whole thus becoming Gemini. An internal TCA contest in late 1960 to name the system as a whole resulted in ReserVec for "Reservations Electronically Controlled".