Univac (Universal Automatic Computer)
UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) was the first mass-produced commercial computer. UNIVAC was the result of a collaborative effort between computer pioneers John Mauchly (1907-1980) and J. Presper Eckert (1919-1995). Their partnership in building advanced computers began in the early 1940s at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Engineering. At the Moore School, Mauchly and Eckert took lead roles in building ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer), the world's first general-purpose electronic computer, and its successor EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer), one of the first computers to implement the stored-program principle. The two men drew heavily on their experiences with ENIAC and EDVAC in the creation of UNIVAC.
In 1946 Mauchly and Eckert jointly applied for a patent for "the automatic, digital computer" (i.e., ENIAC). When the Moore School disputed their patent rights, they left to form the Electronic Control Company, which was the first company in the United States dedicated solely to the manufacture of electronic computers. From the beginning of their commercial partnership, Mauchly and Eckert held a clear idea of what their company's mission would be: to build a data processing computer for business and government that would be standardized and mass produced. These notions were quite innovative in the mid-to-late 1940s, since advanced computers of the era were custom-built and designed to solve scientific and engineering problems. In 1946 the United States Census Bureau agreed to purchase Mauchly's and Eckert's as-yet-unnamed, and unproven, computer for the tabulation of the upcoming 1950 census data. In 1947 the company was incorporated as the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC), and the corporation's main product was christened "UNIVAC." Though not one UNIVAC had been built, EMCC received additional orders throughout the late 1940s. In spite of the many firm orders for UNIVACs, cost overruns meant that by late 1949 EMCC was in serious financial difficulty.
To fend off bankruptcy, Eckert and Mauchly looked for a buyer for their corporation, and eventually approached International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation; but IBM was prevented from purchasing EMCC by anti-trust laws. The Remington-Rand Corporation, however, did not have such restrictions and in 1950 EMCC became the UNIVAC Division of Remington Rand. Eckert and Mauchly were retained to lead the new division, and the first UNIVAC was delivered in mid-1951 to the United States Census Bureau.
UNIVAC had much in common with the two advanced computers that Eckert and Mauchly had been so instrumental in creating, namely ENIAC and EDVAC. Like those two computers, UNIVAC performed its electronic computations using vacuum tubes (it was not until the late 1950s that all-transistor computers were commercially available). Like ENIAC, UNIVAC performed computations using a decimal (i.e., base-10) architecture, versus the binary (i.e., base-2) system that would eventually dominate modern computing. UNIVAC's primary (or main) memory was provided by "mercury delay line" technology, which had been developed by Eckert for use in EDVAC. Though considerably smaller than ENIAC, UNIVAC was nonetheless a large machine--it weighed approximately 8 tons, used over 5,000 vacuum tubes, and consumed around 120,000 watts of electrical power. But UNIVAC went beyond using tried-and-true technology from previous computers; it incorporated new technologies and techniques, such as magnetic tapes for secondary memory.
For the American public of the early-to-mid 1950s, UNIVAC was the prototypical computer. This was in no small part due to its appearance on the CBS television network on election night in November 1952. Early that evening, with only a small percentage of the total vote actually counted, an election-prediction program co-written by Mauchly and run on a UNIVAC correctly predicted a landslide for presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower. This prediction was at first discounted because conventional opinion polls had predicted a close race. Eventually, UNIVAC's successful prediction was released to the public and the potential of computers became clear, even to the layman. Up until 1955, Remington Rand enjoyed a near-total dominance in the large, general-purpose computer market. But in spite of this tremendous lead, IBM became the dominant computer manufacturer by the late 1950s. IBM's answer to the UNIVAC, the IBM 702, possessed several advantages over UNIVAC. For example, UNIVAC was a rather monolithic computer, whereas the 702 was of modular construction, and hence easier both to assemble at the customer's site, and to customize to suit the customer's needs. IBM also provided better customer support through its well-trained technical and sales staffs. Nevertheless, UNIVAC was a successful product for Remington Rand (which in 1955 merged with Sperry Gyroscope to become Sperry Rand Corporation). Though UNIVAC introduced new technologies (e.g., magnetic tape used for secondary data storage), its biggest impact on the future of computing was to demonstrate that large mainframe computers had an important role in data processing fields, like accounting and inventory control, and not just in the engineering and scientific arenas. Subsequent computers were built under the UNIVAC name; for instance, the UNIVAC 1108, which debuted in the mid-1960s, was a successful mainframe computer incorporating IC (Integrated Circuit) technology. In order to avoid confusion the original UNIVAC model is sometimes called UNIVAC I. An original UNIVAC I is housed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C.
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