The combat data system was procured separately to the submarine design; 14 companies were identified as capable of providing what the RAN wanted, from which eight were approached in January 1983 with a separate request for tender. Five responded: a consortium led by Rockwell International of the United States, Plessey of the United Kingdom, Signaal of the Netherlands, Sintra Alcatel of France, and a collaboration between the German Krupp Atlas Elektronik and the British Ferranti. Each tender was required to offer a system with a distributed architecture, despite the absence of an accepted definition for 'distributed computing' at that time, and had to show the cost of programming the software in Ada, although they could offer additional cost breakdowns for other programming languages.