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Happy 50th Birthday, UNIVAC 1
Frums writes: "Today is the 50th birthday of the UNIVAC I (UNIversal Automatic Computer), the first commercial computer. It was quite a beast: 16,000 lbs, 5000 vacuum tubes measuring 9 inches by 2 inches, and an amazing 1000 instructions executed per second! The first UNIVAC was sold to the US Census bureau where it revolutionized data storage from them. No longer did they have to use punch cards, UNIVAC supported storage on metal tape! The US Census bureau still maintains a plaque commemorating the computer. It reads "Bureau of the Census dedicated the world's first electronic general purpose data processing computer, UNIVAC I, on June 14, 1951. Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation" Happy Birthday, UNIVAC I!" Wired has a brief story about it.
#include pedantism;
#include friendly_uk_us_rivalry;
Depends how you define "commercial". Sure, the Univac 1 was the first computer built by a company and sold, but the actual computer did not perform commercial transactions- the owners, the US Census Bureau, were a government organisation, not a business.
The computer that performed the world's first regular routine office job was the LEO Lyons Electric Office in the UK. As well as the Lyons catering firm, LEOs were used by Ford.
My dad worked on a LEO.
--
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
I originally parsed that as: "16,000 lbs, 5000 vacuum tubes, and 9"x2" in size.
Holy crap! The world's heaviest palmtop!d
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Hmmmpf. I'm sure UNIVAC programmers were some of the first to lop off the century field in every date code to save on storage space. "19 to 20 - Ha, we'll let the next generation worry about that one 49 years from now, hahahaha!!"
Sure is a nice clean pic of the machine and attendants on the Wired site - kinda looks like an LCD screen in the middle of the console.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
For those who are interested in the history behind the development of UNIVAC, I recommend the book:
"From ENIAC to UNIVAC, An Appraisal of the Eckert-Mauchly Computers", by Nancy Stern.
Published by Digital (DEC) Press, 1981.
if you can find it. It's been out of print for years.
The book discusses the history and design of ENIAC, EDVAC, BINAC, and UNIVAC. Great reading.
You get the hacks at www.theregister.co.uk to stop writing about Parliament, the BBC, British Telecom, AOL Europe, et. al. and we'll forget the whole Tea Tax thing, ok?
Please expand your horizons a bit more, and learn the difference between truth, and marketing.
Only if you promise to expand your horizons and get a sense of humor. Or, did you really think we are still upset about the tea tax for the colonies?
First off, thank you for posting this - access to such information is a rarity, to say the least. I enjoy reading such old texts, and this is one that is going to keep me coming back, for certain. I oftentimes find humor in such texts - such as:
Notice how in the beginning, it notes that basically the manual isn't an "encyclopedic reference"?
Then you turn to page 13 "Introduction to Computer Operations" - and are given a lesson over the next 40 odd pages on what basically amounts to how to build a damn computer, starting with basic digital circuits and going from there! In fact, the rest of the manual reads the exact same way!
It would be like opening the glovebox in your new car, pulling out the manual, it reading simply, then the rest of the 100 odd pages being a Chilton's or Hayne's!!! Hahahahah!
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
/. is a US-Centric site.
The Reg. is a UK-Centric site.
If either of them makes revisionist statements it is wrong.
In my experience the worst revisionists are not individuals, but US marketing and governmental departments, who want everything to be A) Home-grown, and B) the biggest/bestest/fastest.
If you want to argue that the US has exploited lots of inventions more effectively than the rest of the world, you'll get no argument from me, but please understand that a lot of these 'US' innovations actually came from other countries/cultures. (Ok, I might also debate the meaning of 'exploited' a bit, since not every exploit is for the benefit of humanity).
Please expand your horizons a bit more, and learn the difference between truth, and marketing.
EZ
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
I about a month I will be making a big PR move: I will be having my birthday! Everybody is invited to send me presents. It's great, I don't even have to DO anything! 8)
I hope it's not overshadowed by the United States "Fourth-Of-July" PR event though...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
By acknowledging the Birthday of UNIVAC 1, we acknowledge the effort and acheivement of those who put their skill and persistence into it. We give a nod to our computing origins and those who brought it about in one fell swoop.
Blinking lights are good! As a matter of fact, the server room where i work has a glass wall where our sales staff can look at the machines, and one of IT's internal things is we make the server room look as nice and technical as we can. That means - show the masses the das blinkinlites!
:)
:)
Seriously, though - Sexy machines still use a good number of blinking thingies to tell you if everything is okay. Sexy machines also require grey and purple matte
Disclaimer: Yes, this post is off-topic. No, i don't give a smurfs tail.
They forgot to apologize for the biggest time wasting unintended consequence of all -- Slashdot.
--
Someone you trust is one of us.
One thing which I did not know (and that I learned recently) is that, at the very beginning of computing, NSA actually ordered every single computer made by the different manufacturers... and very often suggested speed improvement...
I know they did this for ENIAC, for instance. And, of course, Cray Research was always very cozy with "No Such Agency".
Insert requested paranoid conspiracy theory here... =)
Source: Body of Secrets by James Bamford.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
And it never actually worked. And it wasn't electric, it was electrical/mechanical.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
Eckert and Mauchly not only created the first commercial computer, they created the technology industry business plan.
They built the ENIAC (the first electronic computer, whith the possible exception of Turing's Colossus) on a contract with the Defense Department at the University of Pennsylvania. They then took the patents from that project and tried to parlay them into a successful company. They attracted some initial investors, but they tried to keep as much control of the company as they could. They got bogged down with side projects and delivered the UNIVAC late. Meanwhile, larger companies with more capital for R&D, and more business and marketing know-how, put Eckert-Mauchly Computer company out of business.
Not much has changed in the technology industry in the last 50 years.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
Here is a nice read about the one's complement logic used in Univac.
Programmers used to add zero (an obvious no-op on today's computers) to weed the negative zeroes out before using bitwise operations. Smart.
Something's just bugging me in that -0 + +0 = +0, though...
One of the big joys of writing an emulator will be emulating +0 and -0 and their inequivalency. The joys of integers before 2's complement...
ER AREAD$
system call.
You know that sinking feeling you get when you realize you've just done an "rm -rf" on the wrong directory? That's very similar to the feeling you get just after hearing the splat of your card deck dropping into a puddle.
This was a decimal machine. Early computing used decimal machines for business, and binary machines for scientific work. There's still a residue of this in the decimal instructions of the x86 and of IBM mainframes.
As a kid, I came across a junked UNIVAC I, including console, at Alert Surplus Sales (920 W St. NW), in Washington, D.C. Got to poke around the insides a bit. The tape drive's reel motors were driven by standard McIntosh audio amplifiers. The console switches were all telephone lever switches. There's no display on the console other than lights.
Working at the Census Bureau in the late 1960s, I met many people who'd used the UNIVAC I machines. They also still had lots of punched-card tabulating gear, but prior to the UNIVAC I, they'd had acres of IBM tabulators. All the IBM gear was on rental; IBM didn't sell their machines. So, once the UNIVAC I was up and running, one day the IBM sales rep was called in and told that Census was cancelling most of the tab gear. It was the biggest return in IBM history, and the event that made T.J. Watson get IBM into computers.
Census still had two UNIVAC 1105 machines running; the biggest vacuum-tube machines ever sold commercially. They still had lots of UNIVAC I tape. The original UNISERVO I tape was 8 track (6 data, 1 parity, one clock), 50 BPI and steel. Not steel on plastic, the tape was a ribbon of steel. Plastic tape, and an upgrade to 200 BPI, came with the UNIVAC 1105 and the UNISERVO II. Bad spots had to be found manually, and a tape with a bad spot could be rewritten if you manually punched a hole in the tape on either side of the bad spot. I still have a reel of this stuff from my years at Case.
The UNIVAC I was operated as a tape-in, tape-out machine. Other standalone systems, each the size of a mainframe computer, did card-to-tape, tape-to-card, and tape-to-printer operations. The keyboard on the console had no display other than the console lights. Typically, UNIVAC I machines spent most of the day sorting, spinning tapes back and forth merging subsorts together. This was inefficient by modern standards, but far, far better than sorting hundreds of millions of punched cards. The sorting job alone justified the machines for Census.
The UNIVAC I was basically the first commercial computer good enough to routinely use for business data processing.
More importantly, where are the NSA guidelines for making it secure?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Unisis forgot the whole "Charging everyone for completely obvious patents" consequence thingie©
"This is not a company that appears to be bothered by ethical boundaries."
Attorney General Mike Hatch on Microsoft
for more history, try univac memories http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/univac/
an interesting site on the last days of big iron before the ascendency of minicomputers.
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
From the Unisys History Newsletter : "The first UNIVAC passed its formal acceptance test on March 29-30, 1951 and was turned over to the Census Bureau, which operated it in the factory for nearly a year. A formal dedication ceremony was held on June 14, but coverage in the general press was minimal."
I should have said that in my original post. Sorry for replying to myself.
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
Disclaimer: Iowa State University is one of my alma maters, so I am naturally biased.
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
the 50th anniversary of ASCII pr0n.
A slightly more detailed chronology.
What would Lemmy do?
Well, the ABC *was* digital but it was very much a special purpose machine that performed a single task, which qualifies it as a calculator rather than a computer. In terms of functionality, it offered little more than Babbage's machines.
You're right, it does deserve a mention, though.
What would Lemmy do?
Well, to be accurate:
"The Manchester Machine (aka Manchester Mk 1)" (1949) was the *second* stored program computer, and was a general purpose machine.
"The Baby" (1947) (also from Manchester) was the *first* stored program computer, and was a general purpose machine.
"Colossus" (1943) was built at Bletchley Park, and was neither a stored program computer nor a general purpose machine.
"ENIAC" (1945) was built at the University of Pennsylvania and was (almost) a general purpose machine, but not a stored program computer.
"Ferranti Mark 1" (February 1951) was the world's *first* commercial computer.
"UNIVAC" (March 1951) was the world's *second* commercial computer.
(I'm not familiar enough with Zuse's contributions to place them accurately, but will acknowledge that they exist)
What would Lemmy do?
I miss those flashy lights... I've been thinking of installing a bunch of them on my box at home, as well as a little device that will make "bing!" and "wrwrwrwr" noises.
Ah, nostalgia.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
The really difficult part is to transfer the GIMP source code to punch cards, which is very environmentally unfriendly.
Next, you'll have to write a C compiler for OS1100 (or whatever it's called nowadays). Hey maybe you could port GCC and upload it to source forge ?
Next is some sort of clustering software, I suggest that you steal the microfiches of the VMS operating system from somebodies desk. They have really good clustering and you might be able to adapt some tricks.
Of course, most of it is written in MACRO32 or BLISS, which leads to another small effort:
Porting BLISS to the UNIVAC (Don't forget to upload to Source Forge, provided they're still in business then).
And presto! You're all set.
No need to thank me...
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
It was created by Dr. J. Presper Eckert and Dr. John W. Mauchly who worked for Remington Rand Inc. It was started in 1946 and was completely on released on this day, 50 years ago.
Here is a link to more information: UNIVAC History
I am
"My son, for example, plays this game called 'I'm Going In,'" Esnouf said. "He spends all Sunday morning shooting people on the computer."
For a company spokesperson, that's a rather unPC thing to say when talking about the benefits that computers have given us.
Your reality is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever. - Baron Munchausen
http://slashdot.org/faq/editorial.shtml#ed850
Ethel.
The computer room in the engineering building at the University of Utah was put in by Univac for the 1108. This room was later the site of one of the original five DARPAnet sites (later the ARPANET and now the Internet).
When I got there as a student, the UNIVAC was long gone, replaced by PDP11-series, VAX and HP9000 minicomputers.
One day late in my schooling (I was there over ten years) I was placing one of the first Linux machines in the computer room when I found a 1108 run card in the space under the floor. Got me to thinking about the early computers and the impact they had on society.
It's really incredible. I spent several hours in awe, walking through there.
They've even got the earliest of early: relatives to Babbage's difference engine, etc. I highly recommend it for anyone who has any geek in them at all.
And, like most of Washington, it's free.
While a computer today weighs 1-1/2 tons and has 18,000 vaccum tubes, in the future, computers might have only 1000 vaccum tubes and weigh only 1/2 ton.
--Popular Mechanics, March 1949
--
"Linux is a cancer" -- Steve Ballmer, CEO Microsoft.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Why do we care about the first commercial computer so muuch? Why not look at hte history (which I find much more interesting), including the work of Alan Turing and all the great men and women who were involved in the Bletchley Park Enigma Codebreaking effort. It's a fascinating piece of history for all; computer enthusiasts, military history fans, and those fascinated with the world of spies and spying. And for those who don't feel like reading what they think yould be dry, historical records, there are laways novelised accounts out there too [I'll dispense with ranting about how historical record chould not be novelized because it draws an audience for a version of history, while plainly offered as fiction, some group of readers will always take as historical fact, distortinh historical truth, etc, etc...]. Having said that, there are a few novelized acconts of this era that are quite cood. Perticularly Enigma, a novel by Robert harris. It was quite entertaining but I recommend reading some of the historical record of the time first, so as not to get yourself into the rut of using it as a reference for historical fact of the time [which, again, I'll rant about some other time...]
--CTH
---
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
It really ammounts to a nice PR move by Unisys. Vary slick. Remind the world that 50 years ago the company was an inovator, well What have you done for me lately?
I was a little disappointed with their spokesman Mr. Esnouf:"My son, for example, plays this game called 'I'm Going In,'" Esnouf said. "He spends all Sunday morning shooting people on the computer. We've invented this whole virtual reality. It's great, isn't it?" Is that really the best light he could put computer gaming in? I'm all for computer games and I'd say 'spending sunday morning shooting people' is a bit harsh. But all in all, Unisys pulled off a vary nice PR move without having to produce announce, or unveil a new product. Good deal for them...
--CTH
---
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
When they got the first numbers and ran the analysis the UNIVAC said that Eisenhower was going to win by a landslide. Well, the programmers didn't believe it so they started looking for the bugs in their code. They looked really hard and fixed a couple of bugs and they got new data and they reran the analysis and it said Eisenhower by a landslide. So they went looking for more bugs...
Finally they had to report their results and they did with great embarrassment because nobody, including the press, believed the Eisenhower could possibly win.
Eisenhower won in a landslide.
My Uncle would always end the story with a moral about having to trust the results of experiments even when they disagreed with your personal belief. He's a great guy, I wish I knew him better.
StoneWolf
I don't necessarily agree with the demand of the post but here is a link which may shed some light. http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/randy.carpente r/folklore/v5n1.html
And thankyou J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly for making our lives better...I think ;)
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
- Dan I.
The incandescent light bulb (with a filament of charred linen) was simultaneously invented by Edison's lab and by some British high-school teacher. They sued each other over patents, and each one won -- in his own country. However, maybe the real credit ought to go to whoever invented a vacuum pump good enough to keep the filament from burning up in residual oxygen. A frenchman (I think) had the basic idea 10 years earlier, but his vacuum wasn't good enough and the bulb died in minutes. The bulbs we use now have a tungsten filament (for a 10x improvement in life-expectancy), sometimes nitrogen gas fill instead of a vacuum, or even a bit of bromine and iodine to combine with evaporating tungsten atoms and re-deposit them on the filament ("halogen" bulbs); I remember that last invention was made by aircraft engineers trying to shrink the size of the wingtip running lights, but I have no idea who made the others.
There was also the electric arc lamp, which was around decades earlier than the incandescent bulb. But in the 19th century it resembled an arc-welder, and someone had to stay there and keep adjusting it as the electrodes burned down. Many decades later, it was tamed by being built into a bulb with automatic control circuits -- neon, mercury arc, and flourescent lights.
I never heard of that airplane in New Zealand. Are there more details on the web? It's possible that simple remoteness cheated the Kiwis out of proper recognition. But it's quite clear why the Wright's got the recognition out of all the Europeans and Americans who were riding wobbly powered kites up in the air at that time: they managed to crash the plane gently enough to be able to repair it and go up again the next day, and to keep it in one piece while they taught themselves how to _land_. Lilienthal (at least) was flying several times before the Wrights, but he always came down hard. He apparently assumed that when he got the airframe right, he could just automatically fly it, while the Wrights did everything possible to prepare themselves and then took baby steps. Even with all that preparation, the first flight ended in a tailspin -- but at 12 feet and maybe 20mph it didn't break the airplane much.
Here's some back-up: :)
A book about the Leo: The Incredible Story of the World's First Business Computer
and a bunch of stuff from the National Archive for the History of Computing here
I thought the original article was fishy
"What are we going to do tonight, Bill?"
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
We in the tech business sometimes have a habit of elevating technology to a sort of self-causing status. For example, we are now celebrating the birthday of UNIVAC, a non-living being which has done nothing of its own accord. I have to ask: where are the humans?
Neither the wired article nor Slashdot so much as mention those who made this, and all subsequent computers a reality. Sure Linus Torveldes buys a taco and it's written up in every Linux rag, but try to give some credit to the people who gave him his opprertunity, and you come up empty! (Never mind that these guys were doing original, really original work, and Linus was just copying).
I demand that Slashdot's editors actually bother to find out who created this machine and publish it. It think that as a computer user, you owe them that much of a memory. Not to mention it might put a stop to all this senseless gadget-worship.
If you want old-skool computers, go to the Science Museum in london. They have a recreation of the first computer in the world (powered by a handle). Good work, Mr. Babbage.
The original was only $1 Million... Seeing how there no practical way for one of us to get one, who is writing an emulator for it...
At only 1000 instructions per second, I'm sure just about any computer could handle it...
Do you need buy.com Coupons
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
In honor of UNIVAC 1's birthday, I've placed a scan of the users manual at http://www.spies.com/aek/pdf/univac/Univac1_OperMa n.pdf
There is a nice picture of the front panel
at the back.
re: simulators
I seriously doubt any UNIVAC 1 code survives
to RUN on a simulator. It appears that there
is very little second generation computer
software left, much less first generation.