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Happy Birthday, UNIVAC I
Daniel Goldman writes "Today is the 53rd birthday of the UNIVAC I
(UNIVersal Automatic Computer I). The UNIVAC I
was delivered to the Census Bureau in 1951. It weighed some 16,000 pounds,
used 5,000 vacuum tubes, and could perform about 1,000 calculations per
second. It was the first American commercial computer, as well as the first
computer designed for business use. The first few sales were to government
agencies, the A.C. Nielsen Company,
and the Prudential Insurance
Company. It could retain a maximum of 1000 numbers and was able to
add, subtract, multiply, divide, sort, collate and take square and cube
roots. Its transfer write/read to and from magnetic tape was 10,000 characters
per second."
Yes, but what is the range of those numbers?
Was it so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe could afford it?
after all these years, it STILL doesn't have decent 3D hardware support video drivers! Bastards!
but this doesn't help much.
Its transfer rate to and from magnetic tape was 10,000 characters per second.
How many Libraries of Congress is that??
/totally serious
I think computers only care about special binary birthdays.
"I'm 110101 years old? So what? I'm looking forward to my 1000000 birthday party! That'll be the day! And don't even get me started about the day I turn 10000000!!!!"
Casual Games/Downloads
Who cares if it runs Linux ... as long as I can mod the case!
Well, maybe, but 53 is a larger number than 50... plus, it's a prime number... :-)
As long as we're recognizing birthdays at arbitrary years, we should do it in true /. fashion...in powers of 2. Let's see something when the 64th birthday rolls around.
Fun with 53 ... too wild)
:)
53 is prime (fun)
5+3 is 8 (not prime, but a power of 2. and we all love powers of 2)
a google search for 53 returns 96,100,000 results and 9+6+1 = 16 (a power of 2!) and 1+6 is 7 (a prime!)
5-3 is 2 (a power of 2, and a prime
And you thought 53 wasn't special
Required reading for internet skeptics
Just last month they had the crew from "This Old House" over to do a case mod for it.
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Nope, it's not the AC's day off. It's just that the UNIVAC I is the only computer that nobody can (even trying their hardest) actually imagine "a Beowulf cluster" of.
Where would you put it? "Oh and over here, next to Texas is New Mexico which, you might find interesting to note is not actually an inhabited state. It's where we keep our UNIVAC Beowulf Cluster. Sweet huh? You can see it from space!"
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