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UNIVAC I Dead

UNIVAC I
KindMachine
Introduced1951
Discontinued1963
StatusDead
ManufacturerEckert–Mauchly / Remington Rand
ClassMainframe
PlatformMercury delay lines
Sourcebitsavers.org ↗

The first commercial American computer — 46 sold, famous for calling the 1952 presidential election on live television against the polls. The EMCC team built it under Remington Rand ownership.

Created by John Mauchly J. Presper Eckert Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation

Delivered to the Census Bureau in June 1951, UNIVAC I was the first US commercial computer — 5,000 vacuum tubes, mercury delay-line memory, 1,905 operations/second. 46 were built for the Census, military, and corporate customers.

On election night 1952, CBS let a UNIVAC predict the result — it called Eisenhower's landslide at 8:30pm, against the polls, and the producers suppressed the prediction until it proved right. That moment introduced the public to computers as oracles.

→ Read the full article on the ALB Wiki

Sources

  1. bitsavers.org/pdf/univac/
  2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIVAC_I