UNIVAC I
More info
- Creator
- J. Presper Eckert, John Mauchly
- Released
- 1951
- Type
- Commercial mainframe
- Owner
- Remington Rand
The first computer you could order rather than build — and the one American newspapers turned into a synonym for "computer".
The Universal Automatic Computer was delivered by Eckert and Mauchly to the US Census Bureau on 31 March 1951. Unlike ENIAC, which the same two men had built, this was a product: 46 units were sold to government agencies, insurance companies and General Electric. It read and wrote magnetic tape instead of punched cards, which was the real leap for administrative data processing.
Fame arrived on election night 1952. With four million votes counted, UNIVAC predicted a landslide for Eisenhower; CBS thought the number implausible and declined to broadcast it, only to admit later that evening that the machine had been right. For a decade afterwards people said "a univac" the way they would later say "a xerox".