UNIVAC (UNIVersal Automatic Computer), invented in 1950 by the physicist J. Presper Eckert and the engineer John Mauchly, was the first commercial computer to be widely available. The German engineer Konrad Zuse's Z machines were available several years earlier in Europe, but not in quantity, and they were unknown in the United States. UNIVAC was the first commercial computer to use stored programs, in which the computer reads the program from storage into its memory and follows its instructions to process data.
UNIVAC grew out of two computers Eckert and Mauchly worked on for the United States Army at the University of Pennsylvania during World War II, ENIAC and EDVAC. ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Calculator), which they designed and patented, featured vacuum-tube processors and could add and subtract twenty-digit decimal numbers. It also performed multiplication. Though faster than earlier computers, ENIAC required considerable human interaction to perform a particular series of operations. Its program and intermediate processing results were held outside the computer on punched cards.
EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) was more like today's computers. Its memory stored a program as well as data, and its processors handled the program and the data the same way. The computer's overall design was developed by the mathematicians John von Neumann, of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, and Herman Goldstine (1913-), and the logician and engineer Arthur Burks (1915-), of the University of Pennsylvania. Eckert and Mauchly designed the EDVAC memory, which consisted of mercury-filled delay lines, in which the incoming electrical signal was converted to a sound wave in the mercury, delaying its output. This process could be repeated as often as necessary to retain the signal.
In 1948, the University of Pennsylvania changed its policy, deciding to take control of patents for equipment designed by faculty members. Mauchly and Eckert left the school and formed the Electronic Control Company, in order to build commercial computers based on their ENIAC patents and EDVAC experience. The first UNIVAC model, completed in 1950, had vacuum tube processors. The mercury delay-line memory held one thousand twelve-digit numbers. Permanent storage was magnetic tape, which could hold up to one million characters. Computer instructions were written in machine language that the computer could understand directly.
Because of financial difficulties, in 1950 Mauchly and Eckert sold their company, including the UNIVAC and ENIAC patents, to the typewriter and calculator manufacturer Remington Rand Company. Eckert stayed with Remington Rand, eventually becoming a corporate vice-president for UNIVAC development. Mauchly became an independent computer developer and consultant.
Despite the computing ability of the new machines, businesses were reluctant to purchase them. The United States Census Bureau, always interested in more efficient data processing, bought a UNIVAC in 1951. But the machine's real popularity began in 1952, when it was used to predict that Dwight D. Eisenhower would win the presidential election by 438 electoral votes over his opponent, Adlai E. Stevenson. Eisenhower won by 432 votes. The first large American corporation to purchase one of the machines was General Electric Co., in 1954, for its accounting department. Eventually, almost fifty UNIVACs were sold, with prices in the million-dollar range.
By the late 1950s, UNIVAC's success brought competition from IBM and other companies, and it soon became one of many mainframe brands on the market. In the 1970s the ENIAC patents were overturned by another computer manufacturer, Honeywell, and by the physicist John Atanasoff, who proved to a court that Atanasoff's A-B-C computer was the basis for ENIAC's design.
Computers named UNIVAC were manufactured into the 1970s, as Remington Rand merged with Sperry Corporation to become Sperry Rand, then Sperry Univac. By the mid-1980s, even the name Univac disappeared, as the company eventually merged with Burroughs and was renamed Unisys.
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