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."

Comments

That would make a great story...

[lightspawn]

3 years ago.

These things don't become "news" every year.

Correct Acronym Explanation?

[Anonymous Coward]

An IBM IT dictionary from the late 1980's I once owned translated it as UNIVersal ACcounting machine.

Seems like a little....

[www.sorehands.com]

[soapbox mode on]

The computing power is low as compared to today's standards, but people forget that the basic principals that apply to developing software for mainframes of 20,30,40 years ago still should apply to developing software for PCs today.

Efficient, well designed, clean code should apply to code today as it did 20 years ago.

[soapbox mode off]

Blast from the Past

[Greyfox]

I ran across some of my granddad's "Lensmen" books a while back. The funny thing about those books was that our heros were capable of faster than light travel, but they had to do all their interstellar navigation using slide rules! It's always fun to see how our current understanding of the world affects our vision of the future.