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UNIVAC's 50th Anniversary

Posted by Hemos on from the lots-of-candles-to-blow-out dept.

A reader writes: "50 years may not sound like a whole lot of time. But in the computer industry it really is a great acomplishment. The UNIVAC is celebrating it's 50th anniversary."

7 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. Vacuum tubes forever! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3
    Vacuum tubes are INDIGENOUS EARTH technology.

    Aliens have long wanted to conquer the Earth. But while possessing superrior space flight technology, they possessed inferrior weapons technology. So they came up with The Plan.

    They deliberately crashed one of their vehicles into New Mexico in the 1940s. It was filled with solid state technology. Transistors, silicon, etc.

    They GAVE us this technology in hopes that we would adopt it and grow dependent on it. And we have. The US gov't along with some selected companies used the tech to create the first transistor (Bell Labs), the first microprocessor (Intel), and so on. Later unleashing newer tech, MSI, LSI, VLSI, etc. It's still going on today ("Coppermine", etc.) Technology was disseminated slowly over time and across a great many companies, some outside the US to dissuede suspicion of the real source of all this new tech.

    Well, we've since pretty much abandoned tubes, vibrators, points (automotive ignition), carburreated engines, core memory, and such. We are now totally dependent on silicon, microcontrollers, transistors, EFI, and other alien based technology.

    And now, all according to The Plan, the aliens can now EMP the Earth from orbit. All our defenses would fail. Missiles would lay dormant in silos. The military would be powerless. Planes would fall out of the sky. Trains would stop. Cars would stop. All world financial information would be wiped out. Life as we know it would grind to a halt. The aliens would be able to take over easily, in the ensuing chaos.

    Our early indigineous Earth science was a threat to them, because cars with carburreators and floats and points ignition, as well as communications gear, missile guidance systems, apollo space vehicles, and computers using vacuum tubes, relays, vibrators, ferrite core memory and such would all continue to operate under continuous EMP bursts and even in high radiation environments (such as a missile launched at the alien's space ship or home world). The aliens wanted to neutralize the threat and they succeeded.

    Except for us few who realized what was going on. When the EMP pulse and the aliens arive, me and my buddies will be the only ones on the road in our 55 Chevy trucks, communicating on our refurbished army surplus PRC-25 radios. Tracking them on our klystron based radar, predicting their actions on our vacuum tube and core memory computers. Our bands of soldiers are in place around the nation, and around the globe. The "right wing radical" groups you today fear, will be the ones to defend humanity when the time comes.

    Bring it on alien doods. We're on to you.

  2. Re:correction by Pig+Hogger · · Score: 4
    BTW anyone know what UNISYS do these days? Are they just a glorified consultant shop? Do they actually have a product?
    They have a product, indeed, and they do is collect royalties on it. The product is the .GIF format.

    --

  3. Let's slashdot the Swiss! by ktakki · · Score: 3
    I'm surprised that John Walker's UNIVAC Memories hasn't been mentioned here (the link is http://fourmilab.ch/documents/univac/ for those wary of goatse.cx). Photos, stories, even source code...

    Excerpts:

    In 1968 you could pick up a 1.3 MHz CPU with half a megabyte of RAM and 100 megabyte hard drive for a mere US$1.6 million. Oh, and you want a printer too...?

    The FASTRAND II was the second member of the FASTRAND family, and by far the most common. The ill-fated FASTRAND I had only one rotating drum and half the storage capacity. A single massive drum rotating almost 15 times a second acts as a powerful gyroscope which tries to stay in a fixed location with respect to the distant stars. Unfortunately, the Earth rotates, and this leads to a conflict between the Earthly imperative of motion and the FASTRAND I's desire to stay put, which resulted in the devices tending to move around the computer room. In the FASTRAND II, the two drums rotated in opposite directions, which cancelled out the gyroscopic effect. The story of the Navy ship which set sail with a spinning FASTRAND only to have it stand on end at the first course change is, as far as I can determine, apocryphal.


    Walker is one of the founders of Autodesk, and is the Jargon File's "J. Random Hacker" in the flesh. His fourmilab.ch web site is an interesting place to spend a rainy afternoon (I recommend The Autodesk Files).

    Yes, there's a North American mirror, but I like the idea of slashdotting Switzerland. Damn gnomes.

    k.
    --
    "In spite of everything, I still believe that people
    are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
    --
    "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
  4. UNIVAC I by Animats · · Score: 3
    That was a cool machine.

    I still have a UNIVAC I tape: steel, 50BPI, 8 track (6 data, 1 parity, 1 clock). Not metal powder on plastic, a ribbon of steel. Bad spots had to be manually located and marked by punching two holes, one on either side of the bad spot. This medium was still usable on a UNIVAC 1107 as late as 1968. I wish I could read the thing; it has some of my undergrad work on it.

    I actually saw a UNIVAC I at Case Tech in operation when I had a tour of the place as a kid. And I once found a scrapped UNIVAC I console and tape drives in a surplus store in Washington, D.C. The tape drives used McIntosh tube audio amps to drive the huge reel motors, and those were valuable to the junk dealer. So were the big banks of electrolytic capacitors. The rest, sadly, was useless.

  5. candles? by byrd77 · · Score: 3
    shouldn't we blow out 50 vacuum tubes to celebrate?
    granted, difficult to setup, but oh the excution...

    --
    - Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.
  6. ...and 2 days later by mrbuckles · · Score: 5

    ...and 2 days later, electronic porn celebrates its 50th anniversary.

  7. Re:correction by Zeinfeld · · Score: 3
    Babbage's engine was a theoretical exercise which was never actually built - at least at the time. It demanded engineering tolerances way beyond what was available back then.

    Actually the replica is built with tolerances easily obtainable at the time, the difference engine did not require tolerances any more demanding than a clock. The victorians were rather good at those.

    Babbage never completed because he was the first nerd, he kept redesigning the system and would never commit the design to manufacture. What Babbage needed was a PHB to kick his ass and force him to meet a ship date.

    The article is still incorrect however, the ENIAC was only completed after the war. The Bletchley park machines were completed long before that, in time to actually be of use.

    Mind you probably not surprising for an article that is probably written strraight from a corposate PR piece for UNISYS.

    BTW anyone know what UNISYS do these days? Are they just a glorified consultant shop? Do they actually have a product?

    --
    Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
    Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/