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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."
from the venerable old-computers.com
It's very special!
...this message brought to you courtesy of the memory of LEO.
Of course, like all British technological innovation, any lead over the rest of the world was quickly thrown away by an incompetent government and business sector.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
The original UNIVAC is now on display in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington
I don't think it would worth to keep UNIVAC running, do to it's massive power consumption and need for contionus maintenance.
Here is a site about UNIVACs today that might be interesting for you.
Here is a site with some history. Apparently, they started on it back in '47. Lyons was originally a tea shop in London, before they branched out into computing.
This would also be a good time to remember Edmund C. Berkeley. He was an insurance executive (an actuary, I believe) who saw the commercial possibilities of the digital computer at a time when it was generally regarded as only an expensive military tool. He was instrumental in convincing Prudential to buy the Univac I. He then left the insurance industry and became the first advocate of computer education, developing some great logic toys (e.g., the Brainiac, the Geniac) and writing some great books for students (e.g., Giant Brains, Symbolic Logic and Intelligent Machines). He was one of the founding editors of Computers and Animation. Berkeley rocked.
From The Case 1107
The central processor was a 36 bit architecture, capable of executing most simple arithmetic instructions in one 4 microsecond cycle time. Multiplication of two 36-bit integers took 12 microseconds, and division of a 72-bit dividend by a 36-bit divisor 31.3 microseconds. The processor performed 36-bit single precision floating point arithmetic in hardware, but did not implement double precision floating point.
From Univac I
The UNIVAC's word size was 72 data bits, which held eleven digits plus a sign, plus one parity bit for each six data bits, giving a total of 84. The mercury delay line memory amounted to 1000 words. Besides numbers, the UNIVAC could represent alphanumeric data (letters of the alphabet and some punctuation marks) using six bits for each character with twelve characters to the word. Codes were assigned for the letters of the alphabet and punctuation marks, such as 010100 for A, 010101 for B, 010110 for C and so on.
According to Why do We need a floating-point arithmetic standard?
Univac 110x float:
Underflow limit = 2^-129 ~ 1.5 x 10^-39
Overflow limit = 2^27 ~ 1.7 x 10^8
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Here's a great freeware UNIVAC simulator you can use until you get your own UNIVAC off eBay. MTBF on those babies was somewhere around 10 hours due to the use of vacuum tubes...hopefully your PC running this sim will post somewhat better reliability numbers. :D If you'd like to see some dino-iron in person, a similar-era ENIAC resides in a basement museum in the Engineering School at the University of Michigan. This page is full of good information and links. Also, check out this list if you're interested in restorations of other ancient machines such as Crays and Cybers; my favorites are the Royal-McBee LGP 21 and 30 machines, immortalized in the Jargon File mythologies about Real Programmers. Read The Story of Mel and be enlightened (as well as entertained) about how a True Master thinks when dealing with the limitations of old hardware. It's so Zen it will make you clap with one hand.
The 1107 was not the Univac I, nor was the architecture similar. The story goes that Univac numbered their machines from 1 to 12. They didn't want to call something the Univac 13, so they named it the 1101, or 13 in binary. The 1101 evolved into the 1107, 1108, etc, and still lives on as the 2200 series. The Univac FASTRAND II drum, supposedly made of machined sewer pipe, was used on the early 1100 machines. It had 192 positions of 64 tracks of 64 sectors of 36 bit words each, and was the primary storage device on the 1107s I worked on in the early 70s.
Also, here's a reference to Univac and its one vacuum tube.
If the /. folks get their panties in a knot over an ASIMOV reference, I don't know what this world has come to! Is slashdot now only for praising Apple and bashing Bill? Can't we get back to basics with geeky sci-fi references?
Best Buy can have you arrested
The original manual can be found at bitsavers.org.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Many people do not know that OS2200 which operates on the UNISYS Clearpath systems is a direct decendant of the original Univac OS.
I was an operator on a 2200 class system in the early 90's.
As mainframes go, it was pretty cool!
They already did it.
Though it was IBM, not Univac equipment.
BTW, Tubes Rock!
Those little lamps weren't LEDs, probably they were neon lamps. In hardware with a lot of vacuum tubes, burned filaments were the most common problem. To help find the burned tubes, they put the filaments in series of ten or so tubes, with a neon lamp in parallel with each tube. The operating filament voltage wasn't enough to turn on the neon lamp, but when a filament burned, the full voltage for all the series appeared across the terminals of the burned tube and the neon lighted up.
Well yes, there was a Univac II and the first full-up transistorized (and core memory for RAM) model was called Univac III although it wasn't compatible. There was emulator software to help people convert Univac I/II programs to the Univac III.
The Univac III was roughly contemporaneous with the Univac 1107. There would be no Univac IV. The 1107 line continued long into the Unisys regime. The Univac III lacked a scalable architecture and died against the System/360 and movement to plug-compatible systems, including those acquired from RCA.
For those who live in the area or might be passing through, the Melbourne Museum currently has CSIRAC on display.
The museum claims that CSIRAC was the fourth computer in the world, and the only one still completely intact (though I've come to be suspicious of such claims). They also say it was the first computer to generate music (I vaugely remember a similar claim from an English computer in Turing's biography...)
Anyway, claims aside, it is still impressive and you can get pretty close to it and have a good look.
IIRC, the origin of the Guinness book of records was to settle the debates that one gets into after a few pints at the pub, eg. "I tells ya, a greyhound can outrun a racehorse!" etc. That's why the book was originally published by the brewer GUINNESS and filled with "faster, bigger" type facts. These days they have all kinds of scrutineering to verify any world records published, but I still don't think it's quite ready to rank up there as a reputable scientific journal yet.
Also because of the geographic origins of the publication (Guinness = Ireland I assume;-) there might be some UK-centric bias. I'm not accusing Guinness of any underhanded practices here, merely that they are likely to receive many more submissions for inclusion from their side of the Atlantic, and that these submissions would be simpler to verify.
I for one am just saddenned that they have discontinued so many of the "gluttony" records in recent editions, for fear they would be sued if some idiot ate 50kg of canned prunes and crapped himself inside out.
I haven't looked at a Guinness Book of Records recently, so some of this may no longer be current.
sustainable living
Punch card machines are recognized as being the first mechanical computer and they were invented by IBM in the USA
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)