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

UNIVAC sounds great and all...

[Fortunato_NC]

But can it run Linux?

Also, does it play Ogg?

Re:UNIVAC sounds great and all...

[greechneb]

It may have been delivered on this date, but how long did it take to get it online?

Re:UNIVAC sounds great and all...

[daehrednud]

Or better yet, is it open source? Cause if it's not we don't want to hear about those worthless closed source systems!

Re:UNIVAC sounds great and all...

[stinkyfingers]

Who cares if it runs Linux ... as long as I can mod the case!

Re:UNIVAC sounds great and all...

[e9th]

It wasn't open in the GPL sense, but in those days everything was compiled (well, assembled) on site from sources. It was normally the customers' responsibility.

That would make a great story...

[lightspawn]

3 years ago.

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

Re:That would make a great story...

[strictnein]

Exactly... there are a lot of old computers out there and a 53rd birthday is nothing special (nor, really, is a 50th birthday, but we do attach meaning to that)

My prediction:

June 14, 2005: Happy Birthday, UNIVAC I

Re:That would make a great story...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or this story celebrating something 21 years ago. Equip yourself with a computer history calendar and a space exploration calendar... get stories accepted almost every day!

Re:That would make a great story...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, maybe, but 53 is a larger number than 50... plus, it's a prime number... :-)

Re:That would make a great story...

[Freefall90]

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.

Re:That would make a great story...

[ianbnet]

aww, why not. I think it's a good idea to celebrate milestones like this.

After all, I like comparing my wristwatch to a multi-ton metal beast

Re:That would make a great story...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a basist viewpoint.

I look forward to the day when all numbers are judged not by what other numbers divide them, but by their own magnitude. Each number has its own unique contribution to make, and 53 is certainly not a lesser number than 50.

Re:That would make a great story...

[lightspawn]

Each number has its own unique contribution to make, and 53 is certainly not a lesser number than 50.

I've got a 53 dollar bill right here saying you're wrong.

Oh wait, actually I don't.

Re:That would make a great story...

[The Almighty Dave]

...and 53 is certainly not a lesser number than 50.

I bow to your superior math skills.

Re:That would make a great story...

[bluethundr]

Exactly... there are a lot of old computers out there and a 53rd birthday is nothing special (nor, really, is a 50th birthday, but we do attach meaning to that)
I'm totally with you man. However, I will be looking forward to it's 0x37 bday on 0xE067D6.

Re:That would make a great story...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not according to my calculator (I'm using GNU "bc" on a Pentium btw):

56 / 7 = 8.428571428571429

Re:That would make a great story...

[Threni]

> aww, why not. I think it's a good idea to celebrate milestones like this.

Because 53 isn't a significant number. We choose numbers like 20 or 50 otherwise every year you'd be celebrating everything! Think about it!

where is it now?

[2057]

I'd love to see this beast live and crunching numbers... anyone, know where its grave is or if they have it running

Re:where is it now?

[greechneb]

The original UNIVAC is now on display in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington

Re:where is it now?

[Tranzig]

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.

Re:where is it now?

[Rick.C]

I'd love to see this beast live and crunching numbers

Back in 1951 there were factories that pumped out vacuum tubes by the millions. That was convenient, because Univac burned out tubes by the thousands.

Firing up an old Univac would require firing up some old tube factories, too.

Re:where is it now?

[bhtooefr]

What about a UNIVAC emulator? You could even hook up equivalents of the peripherals to it, and have a somewhat realistic experience without blowing tubes.

Re:where is it now?

[ackthpt]

I'd love to see this beast live and crunching numbers... anyone, know where its grave is or if they have it running

When my Explorer Post was given an old computer to play with (a DEC PDP-3) we found, after getting it to do a few simple things, that disposing of it even in the late 70's was a hazardous/toxic waste issue. As "Love Canal" had already met with public attention, and commercial electrolytes showing up in cattle, we had either the choice of paying transporation to send it to a museum which would have taken it or pay to dispose of it. Since Dow was our Post sponsor, they were willing to bundle it up with other electronic gear for proper disposal.

As much as these old beasts are fascinating, they're a pain to get rid of.

Re:where is it now?

[john82]

My wife works for Prudential's former mortgage business unit (since acquired by a certain stagecoach company). Judging from the interface and performance (or lack thereof), I think I can say without equivocation that Prudential's UNIVAC is still in service.

The other giveaway is the large coal chute on the back side of the building.

Re:where is it now?

[MdotCpDeltaT]

My dad used to do tech service on the Univac in Kansas City at the USDA building. (It took an entire building to just hold the computer.) One Christmas he took me on a tour of the computer. They had programmed the different pieces of equipment to make their distinct noises to play Christmas Carols. Also got a real tour of the computer - from the inside. We walked through one area where I was told that if I tripped, to grab a cable that would cut the power to the computer to keep from get electricuted when I hit the tubes. All in all a pretty fascinating tour,

Re:where is it now?

[Waffle Iron]

I was reading about the U.S. airforce's SAGE systems a while ago. They built a couple of dozen of these tube-based computers that consumed ~1 megawatt each. The last ones weren't taken offline until the 1980s.

The funny part is that these were built to coordinate air defenses against a Soviet bomber strike, but towards the end of their life they had to buy replacement tubes from countries in the Soviet bloc because they were the only places that still manufactured them.

Re:where is it now?

[DoraLives]

yes but would it run linux?

Dunno, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't run windows.

By the way, my mom used to work for Univac as a stenographer, out on Cape Canaveral back in the 50's. She'd bring home boxes of punched tapes, punch cards, and all the rest of the detritus of mid 20th century computing. We thought we were the hot shit playing around with that stuff as kids. Space Age! Whoa!

Re:where is it now?

[war3rd]

Does it play Ogg?

Re:where is it now?

[bplipschitz]

Back in 1951 there were factories that pumped out vacuum tubes by the millions. That was convenient, because Univac burned out tubes by the thousands.

Firing up an old Univac would require firing up some old tube factories, too.

All this talk is making it sound as though tubes are inherently unreliable. I'm betting that there wasn't a whole lot of forced air cooling in this beast, and heat *will* eventually get tubes, just like other electronics.

I've had tube based electronics run for years on end without failure. Granted, they weren't computers, but the better ones used proper cooling.

Re:where is it now?

[archevis]

To get an impression, try installing Windows XP on a 1998 state-of-the-art computer. Then add the smell of toasted tubes and remove the concept of bluescreens. Ey - you're practically there!

Re:where is it now?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Actually, I was guessing that the UNIVAC itself was causing the tubes to burn out, not the tube itself. I can imagine that at 1,000 calculations per second, those things might be a bit more ready to burn out than with more, atleast at the time, common use.

Re:where is it now?

[Tesral]

I was reading about the U.S. airforce's SAGE systems a while ago. They built a couple of dozen of these tube-based computers that consumed ~1 megawatt each. The last ones weren't taken offline until the 1980s.

I know a fellow that worked on the SAGE machines. Maintainace was constant thing. Some tube or another was always blowing out. They had to track it down and replace it. They did get to do fun things. Like programing it to print a banner that said "Merry Christmas" Took six weeks of flipping switches and turning keys. Make sure you tell you keyboard and mouse how much you love them and polish your flat screen with the greatest love. The good old days, weren't

Re:where is it now?

[Rick.C]

I've had tube based electronics run for years on end without failure.

But your devices only used a few tubes and the aggregate MTBF was still pretty large.

I think the problem is that the filaments burn out, just like lightbulbs do. The filaments are in a vacuum inside the tube, so forced air cooling is not going to cool them down any. Not that you'd want to cool down the filament, because then the tube wouldn't work.

This is about ENIAC, but the problem was the same:

"UNIVAC was the brainchild of two physicists named J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly. They had worked on the U.S. government's ENIAC computer during World War II, and finished it in 1946. They figured that there ought to be civilian uses for the enormous computing power of such a machine. ENIAC was a monster which weighed 30 tons and used 17,468 vacuum tubes to do its work. It was the largest practical computer that could be built based on vacuum tubes because in order to make it more powerful you'd have to add significantly more vacuum tubes and the mean time between failure (MTBF) of the vacuum tubes used was such that if you ran much more than 17,468 vacuum tubes some would always be "blown out," as we used to say of light bulbs and vacuum tubes, so you'd never be able to use the bigger machine."

Re:where is it now?

[bplipschitz]

Actually, I was guessing that the UNIVAC itself was causing the tubes to burn out, not the tube itself. I can imagine that at 1,000 calculations per second, those things might be a bit more ready to burn out than with more, atleast at the time, common use.

I guess it really depends upon how they were being used--radio transmission tubes are used pretty hard, but don't burn out quickly. Probably a case of intended use vs. actual use.

Re:where is it now?

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

There was a discussion in this area recently on the Unisys newsgroup. It did not go quite the same way in that people were looking at emulating more recent machines. That is something that would make more sense.

Having looked at the pdf of the Univac I documentation, I would have to ask: why would anyone want to emulate that? The machine itself is miniscule by any normal standards (as to 'would it run linux?', try running linux with 1000 words of memory) and it's peripherals are just insane.

Many years ago, I had to program a PDP 8. It had a 3-bit instruction field, 9-bit addresses (I think - this is almost 30 years ago) including a 'paging' bit. The lowest 256 words were always accessible, and you could select which 256-word 'page' you would be accessing if the leftmost addressing bit was set. You could program the thing - in assembler - by tweaking the 12 switches on the front panel, or using paper tape. No-one ever made it plausible to me why anyone would want to.

1000 numbers

[Quill_28]

Yes, but what is the range of those numbers?

Re:1000 numbers

[mikael]

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

Re:1000 numbers

[k_yarina]

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.

Re:1000 numbers

[mikael]

My mistake. From this page, It still looks the Univac I had the precision of 12 decimal places?

Re:1000 numbers

[mikael]

The original manual can be found at bitsavers.org.

Re:1000 numbers

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

I never worked with Fastrands, but was told that they took hours to rotate up to speed and that they often lost data with 'bad spots'.
You missed something, each Fastrand sector was 28 words of 36 bits.

That user's manual for the Univac I is amazing - 1000 (decimal) words of memory.

Re:1000 numbers

[Cmdr TECO]

Pop up to here and you'll find more information and photos (best tape drives ever).

Eleven digits (BCD) plus sign.

Re:1000 numbers

[k_yarina]

You're right, I typed too fast. There was 64 sectors of 28 36 bit words per track, giving 1792 words/track. 28 is, of course, a perfect number. Ours were sitting on steel I-beams directly on the concrete floor - otherwise they'd crack the floor.

Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

Was it so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe could afford it?

Re:Well,

[soft_guy]

Was it so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe could afford it?

No. You must be thinking of the Apple Lisa.

Re:Well,

[sharkey]

You must be thinking of the Apple Lisa.

Does it really matter? The truly important question is, "Can it be used for dating?"

And yet

[Anonymous Coward]

after all these years, it STILL doesn't have decent 3D hardware support video drivers! Bastards!

Re:And yet

[WinterpegCanuck]

Forget 3d, can you imagine compiling gentoo on this? and I thought my Athlon was slow. . .

**ducks**

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine a beowulf cluster of these...
;-)

Re:**ducks**

[bhtooefr]

125KW per box, we'll make a small 16-box cluster, so that's TWO MEGAWATTS! WOW!

I remember UNIVAC I

[Animats]

I wrote about this back on the 50th anniversary.

I started my career on Univac / Unisys

[uid100]

What a great experience - a punch card reader was right next to the disk cache cabinet. Univac consoles are still my favorite "clicky" style keyboards. The Univac 1170 had dials for choosing the tape drive for IPL, switches for the memory banks and a small black button to initiate the IPL. Lots of flashing LED's to tell us what was going on. This was to support weather forcasting in the USAF.

Yes that's good and all

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Yes that's good and all

[Limburgher]

Actually, it's Libraries of Congress/second. As opposed to Minivans full of DVDs.

Some more specs/info

[fuzzix]

from the venerable old-computers.com

Re:Some more specs/info

[randyest]

Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see a mention of these facts or power specs anywhere at old-computers.com or in the links from the post:

- The UNIVAC became famous when it was use by the US Census Bureau to calculate the results of the 1952 presidential election.

- The number of vacuum tubes was reduced fmor about 19,000 to 5,000, therefore reducing the power consumption from 175 kilowatts to 100 kilowatts (!), and also reducing the size and weight. (In comparison, your PC probably has a 200-500Watt power supply -- this thing needed about 200x as much power!)

- The machines cost about $1Million, so most customers wanted to lease them rather than buy outright.

Re:Some more specs/info

[fuzzix]

Cool!
The old-computers page has a request for more info on this machine - I'm sure they'll appreciate anything you can contribute.

53 special? You bet!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's very special!

Whats new?

[Mz6]

Soo.. Whats new about it? More importantly, whats been added? Does it come pre-installed with Duke Nuken Forever? *ducks*

UNIVAC = Johnny-come-lately

[Aardpig]

...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.

Re:UNIVAC = Johnny-come-lately

[mkavanagh2]

In fact, LEO was 'delivered' in november 1951. The first UNIVAC was delivered in march.

Re:UNIVAC = Johnny-come-lately

[Andy_R]

LEO wins if you count their own machine as the first commercial installation.

Re:UNIVAC = Johnny-come-lately

[mkavanagh2]

It's all in interpretation. It was designed for business and it shipped first; therefore it was the first business computer. LEO was the first computer owned and used by a business; therefore it was the first business computer.

Re:UNIVAC = Johnny-come-lately

[Open Council]

The Guinness Book of Records examined all the evidence from both sides and awarded this certificate . They accept that, although UNIVAC was produced commercially a few weeks ahead of LEO, the LEO was the first computer designed for business use and the first actually used for business.

Uni-Vac

[sulli]

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.

heh. when I was a kid and first heard about UNIVAC, I thought the name meant that it used one vacuum tube.

Correct Acronym Explanation?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Correct Acronym Explanation?

[SillyNickName4me]

You guys still type that on an office/vm commandline? whatis is way cool tho..

me too!

[arakis]

That is funny. I even prepared a report on Maulchy and Eckert for a physics class and I didn't know that today is the day. Guess that is because this is my birthday! I'm only 25 though.

Re:me too!

[wcrowe]

My birthday too!

I'm the same age as the answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything.

Re:53rd birthday? what's special about it?

[strictnein]

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!!!!"

Has anyone tried...

[Len Budney]

Building one of these using transistors? It should reduce maintenance costs, and the leftover power would meet all the energy needs of the museum it lives in, plus the surrounding towns.

Re:Has anyone tried...

[orcmid]

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.

Univac was called "Univac"

[callipygian-showsyst]

because it had just one Vacuum Tube. That's why Asimov had to develop Multivac.

Re:Univac was called "Univac"

[Paulrothrock]

Cool Story. Thanks for sharing.

Re:Univac was called "Univac"

[callipygian-showsyst]

There's more information about Multicac here.

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?

A time when anything was possible

[Lord Grey]

UNIVAC's possibilities fired the imagination. Science fiction writers populated magazines and books with powerful computers, based on what they knew of UNIVAC. Pretty cool stuff, if you don't think it's quaint.

BTW, one of the best short stories along those lines was Isaac Asimov's The Last Question (published in Nine Tomorrows among other places). The focus isn't really the computer, but it shows how people were thinking about these new-fangled gadgets at the time.

Re:A time when anything was possible

[Trurl's Machine]

Funny - I asked the Asimov question to the contemporary equivalent of the Asimov omniscient machine and got the same answer as people in this short story. Obviously because it was pointing to web sites about the short story itself, but...

Re:A time when anything was possible

[GoofyBoy]

How can you go wrong writing sci-fi about "UNIVAC", the ULTIMATE WORLD-CONQUORING COMPUTER!. He is powered by the brains of lesser creatures, foolish mortal!

Today its an "iMac" or "eMachines". They sound like something I should cuddle up with a nice cup of tea.

Re:A time when anything was possible

[WWWWolf]

Yeah! And what about programming? Some time after UNIVAC, people who programmed started their programs with massively epic-sounding Words of Power, like PROGRAM. Even mentioning that stuff aloud made those Old Computers make fearsome noises. That had style.

These days, "main()" just doesn't sound like the same, and many popular languages don't even have specifically labelled entry point. I mean, where is the glory these days, dammit?

Re:A time when anything was possible

[sql*kitten]

was Isaac Asimov's The Last Question

How amusing that Asimov thought that we'd have interstellar travel before we had a smaller replacement for the transistor! But I don't know whether that makes him an optimist or a pessimist.

Re:A time when anything was possible

[DynaSoar]

Lord Grey (463613) sez: "BTW, one of the best short stories along those lines was Isaac Asimov's The Last Question (published in Nine Tomorrows among other places)." ...which was the conceptual origin of the existentially troubled Bomb 19 in "Dark Star".

"Let there be light."

Not the first business computer

[dave420]

The LEO, Lyons' Electronic Office, was built earlier in 1951...

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.

Re:53rd birthday? what's special about it?

[sulli]

Maybe the submitter is an Asynchronous Transfer Mode geek.

Edmund C. Berkeley

[Nakito]

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.

Re:Edmund C. Berkeley

[Nakito]

Wait, I meant to type "Computers and Automation," not "Animation." Must have been a sort of geek freudian slip I guess.

That would have been some birth...

[Stoutlimb]

Did UNIVAC's mother need stitches?

Seriously, do we really need to anthropomorphize machines this much? It was popular to do in the fifties and sixties, but aren't we over that by now?

Bork!

Re:That would have been some birth...

[Stoutlimb]

Would I really have to wait weeks? ;-))

Re:53rd birthday? what's special about it?

[narcc]

Fun with 53
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 ... too wild)

And you thought 53 wasn't special :)

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]

Re:Seems like a little....

[GoofyBoy]

>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.

You still have team meetings about the correct way to number your punchcards?

And...

[Whatthehellever]

And the UNIVAC1 still wasn't powerful enough for "Windows '51"!

Oblig. Simpsons Paraphrase

[Paulrothrock]

Yes I realize the irony of using a computer to protest computers.

And in other news...

[Aardpig]

...Krispy Kreme, manufacturer of premium farinaceous products, have announced the construction of a new supercomputer. The device, which will contain 1729 million AMD Opteron CPUs, linked to 1 terabyte of 2 picosecond RAM via a 1 Exabit/s bus, will be used to model the diffusive transport of coffee throughout glazed doughnuts.

Re:And in other news...

[Junior J. Junior III]

Wow, that should be enough to run Longhorn!

Geek math

[Junior J. Junior III]

Ok, who can make 53 years a significant (ie round number) anniversary? I guess it's easy enough if you count in Base-5.3 notation. What planet would you have to be on in order for a 53-earth year observance to correspond to a meaningful celestial event relative to your system?

Re:Geek math

[Kallahan]

(5 - 3) + 3 = 5, 5 * 5 = 25, sqrt(25) = 5. 53 clearly abides by the LAW OF FIVES, therefore it is significant.

Re:Geek math

[stratjakt]

It's 10 years old in base 53, a nice round number.

Re:Geek math

[KingOfBLASH]

[IANAL]

It's still 53 years old in base 53, it's just represented as 10. Now if you lived on a planet which took 5.3 years to revolve around the sun, it would be 10 years for you.

[/IANAL]

Re:Geek math

[pboulang]

The Univac was definitely not speedy. You would want to celebrate speed, so you would think of something fast, such as the fastest planet: Mercury. However, you also want something terrestrial, so you look at 220. Of course! Here's the importance:

220 years (local) to Mercury is the equivalent of 19360 earth days (one mercury year is 88 earth days)

If you divide 19360 earth days by 365.25 (earth days in a year) you come out with the happy number of 53 years!

Wow! 53 years old...

[ConceptJunkie]

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of...

Never mind.

Daniel Goldman's Calendar

[stevesliva]

Why don't we just put Daniel Goldman's today in old hardware history service on the front page? Pioneer 10 yesterday, Univac today... what's tomorrow?

Happy Birthday leopard

[TyrelHaveman]

Some day is the first birthday of one of my computers, leopard, that was delivered (in peices) to my house in 2003. It weighs under 20 pounds, uses no vacuum tubes, and can perform about 5,200,000,000 calculations per second (avg 2 instructions per clock cycle). It was the first >1 GHz computer in my house, as well as the first with hyperthreading technology. It can retain a maximum of 134,217,728 32-bit numbers and is able to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and thousands of other things. Its transfer rate to and from magnetic floppy disk is about 32,768 characters per second, and its transfer rate from magnetic hard disk buffers is about 35,410,000 characters per second.

I hate to have paid for this story

[Omega1045]

I would feel like a real schmuck if I had paid to view this story from the mysterious future.

And in comparison...?

[LiberalApplication]

Just out of curiosity, how does this compare to the capabilities of an entry level PDA?

security?

[darkain]

how secure is this system? if i buy one, am i going to have to run "univac update" every day? or does it support automatic updates from a remote tape drive?

obligatory (-5, redundant)

[snot whistle]

imagine a beowolf cluster of these - you could heat a whole town!

Re:obligatory (-5, redundant)

[wandazulu]

They already did it.

Though it was IBM, not Univac equipment.

Laugh if you must...

[Anonymous Coward]

At the slow speeds, but if you think about it, it probably rivals modern (windows) computers in speed when you take into account viruses, OS hangs, blue screens of death, spyware, pop-up ads, etc.

Re:Laugh if you must...

[TheHawke]

Heh, just wait until you have to debug the software, having to load the cards into it agian and agian, until you get a worn card, then the card reader jams hard and proceeds to munch on the rest of your program. That's what we call a HARD crash!

First Virus?

[Inda]

The page about the game ANIMAL brought back memories. I can't remember the name of the computer I played this on - it was about 20-25 years ago.

I didn't know the game was a 'virus'. Very interesting.

http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/univac/animal.ht ml

Obligatory Simpsons quote (Professor Frink)

[Ismenio]

Frink: Well, sure, the Frinkiac-7 looks impressive, don't touch it, but I predict that within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.

I question the claim that it was the first for biz

[Anonymous Coward]

I knew a old guy who claimed to help develop the first computer delivered to a business. He was an old hacker who worked on the software, and he claimed that their computer was the first delivered to a business. I have no reason to doubt him. I do know that sometimes history sweeps stuff up and lumps it all together, ignoring the realities. One such example was that Phil Zimmerman released PGP, when he didn't (he just developed it, and didn't want anything to do with the actual release).

I've forgotten the name of the company; all I know is that it was developed back in the 50's, and he worked on it down in Los Angeles. And the first business to buy it was a Bank.

I've also run across another person who's professor claimed to work on the first computer released to a business.

So I think this history of the UNIVAC appears to be questionable in certain regards. Anybody know of some good historical reference material? Something based upon actual research, and not marketing hype?

Next year is more important!

[JayJay.br]

It will turn... ...42!

(base 13, of course).

UNIVAC says...

[Anonymous Coward]

01010100011010000110000101101110011010110010000001 0110010110111101110101

(http://nickciske.com/tools/binary.php)

Re:53rd birthday? what's special about it?

[pavon]

Proof by contridiction that all natural numbers are interesting:

Suppose that there is at least one uninteresting natural number. One of those numbers must be the smallest uninteresting number.

Now that's pretty interesting.

Re:where is it now? - Dino-iron is not extinct yet

[xmark]

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.

Putting UNIVAC I to good use...

[Mick Ohrberg]

I love the story about using the UNIVAC as a morse code oscillator. Wouldn't that be the equivalent to using a SUN E15k to play Doom?

Where's Ken Brown?

[zymurgy_cat]

I looked at that instruction set. There's no way some researchers could have written that 50+ years ago without help. I hope Mr. Brown gets on this quick and finds out who really wrote the instruction set and how it was stolen. Hell, I'll bet that bastard Linus ripped it off and put it into the first Linux kernel.

Re:Where's Ken Brown?

[CaptainPinko]

aw fuck... don't tell me that "there is no way... tell Ken Brown" becomes the next uneradicatable meme along with AYOB and beowulf and soviet russia... please stop now. and don't breed either.

I'll tell you what's been added!

[JudgeFurious]

Just last month they had the crew from "This Old House" over to do a case mod for it.

amazed by the specs

[xonen]

Wow, i am amazed by the specifications. This 'beast' almost outperfoms my ZX-81! zx-81: 1Kb memory, tape I/O: 300bps.. only thing that is (little) faster may be effective clockspeed: 1Mhz, but i doubt if the zx-81 can take 1000 square roots in one second ;) Looks like it took microelectronics about 30 years to make a -payable- equivalent of this machine.

Re:amazed by the specs

[Tune]

Indeed. Compare that to the current situation where videocards are able to generate images in real time of about the same quality as Jurassic Park (which was obviously rendered off line). Mainstream (and relatively cheap) videocards more than caught up with state-of-the-art technology in a little over 11 years.

So, though the UNIVAC would currently be uninteresting from a practical point of view, it was far ahead of its time (at the time).

--
Real computer scientists despise the idea of actual hardware. Hardware has limitations, software doesn't. It's a real shame that Turing machines are so poor at I/O.

As fast as AOL?

[192939495969798999]

I'm pretty sure the typical AOL dialup connection is getting 10,000 characters per second on a GOOD day. Granted, the UNIVAC wasn't using a modem, but it also wasn't trying to send the latest borders to go around the same ol' content.

Re:What no "Imagine a Beowolf cluster" jokes yet?

[JudgeFurious]

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!"

set your calenders

[morcheeba]

Today UNIVAC is only 0x63b21e80 seconds young. Get ready for July 2nd, 2019, when it turns the big 0x80000000 ! It'll be a party unlike any seen since June 22nd, 1985 (0x40000000 seconds)

(p.s. old age officially begins at 33 bits - July 20, 2087)

Re:set your calenders

[soft_guy]

That's a geek for you... excited about a party 15 years in the future that lasts one second.

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.

Re:Blast from the Past

[Idarubicin]

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!

This seems to be a recurring theme in classic science fiction. In James Blish's Cities in Flight novels, I remember a scene that described in passing the automated deviced that consumed the dishes from table, and recycled all the waste for the next meal.

One of the characters was irked because the table ate his slide rule.

Flying a City at a comfortable multiple of c was accomplished under the control of City Fathers: advanced computers that used...transistors. (Some very old Cities still used tubes.) Germanium was a currency metal, a situation that presumably developed due to the huge volume of the stuff necessary to supply the computing needs of a galaxy....

Still, credit where it is due--Blish wrote an excellent series, and it's still worth a read.

Re:Blast from the Past

[randombit]

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!

Some Heinlein short stories are like that, though not quite so bad. In one story a rocket to the moon (or Mars, I foget) has to radio to a space station in orbit around Earth to get calculations done (on mechanical calculators!).

Re:Blast from the Past

[Tesral]

It's always fun to see how our current understanding of the world affects our vision of the future.

Science Fiction is always a better reflector of the present than it is a light shed on the future.

Don't Laugh

[superpulpsicle]

Ten years from now people will laugh at your 3.0GHz PC. Oh wait, you don't even have to wait that long now.

Decendant of Univac I still in production

[Danathar]

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!

Re:Decendant of Univac I still in production

[nlindstrom]

That's nothing. Why, back in my day, we did our computin' using a slide ruler, and we liked it!

Holy Cow!

[sparkydot]

I worked on a UNIVAC I at a company called AirResearch in Phx, Az in 1967. It was a blast! Everything the entire dept did then could be done from my desktop PC today. I must be older than dirt...

In Soviet Russia...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, seriously this time. Svetlana makes thes old beasties. Started making light bulbs over 100 years ago, now about the biggest (only?) tube maker in the world. Ever think the US would be importing computer technology from Russia?

BTW, Tubes Rock!

Re:First {Multi platform} Virus?

[Graemee]

I remember seeing this program in 1979 or early 80. It was an after school session on different computers and apps from some guys our CS teacher asked in. I took my father since he was interested too. If I remeber it ran on an Atari 800 and had like three animals in it. I remember adding aardvark, Does it eat ants?.

Re:where is it now? - Dino-iron is not extinct yet

[Dman33]

a similar-era ENIAC resides in a basement museum in the Engineering School at the University of Michigan

You beat me to it. I wanted bragging rights! Is it in a basement museum now? It used to be in the EECS bldg right in an inset in one of the halls. Well, I suppose the entire thing was not there, I imagine it would be too big.

What if you have more than one?

[Dwonis]

What is the plural form of UNIVAC?

Sorry, but it has to be said...

[Samuel Nitzberg]

... Just imagine a beowulf cluster of those ...

No LEDs in 1951!

[mangu]

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.

Re:No LEDs in 1951!

[uid100]

The Univac 1170's I worked on were built in 1978/79. they were replaced with a pair of 2200/600's in the early 1990's. I am pretty sure they had LED's on the master control panel. I still have some 8" floppy disks for loading the SP (service processor) and a 14" disk platter from a fixed disk. Some of the FE's would do interesting things to the hardware such as running a program that would make the tape drives hum different tunes, Chrismas tunes being the favorite. I got very good at slinging those 9-track reels. The interesting mechanical part was the high speed printers. They were band style line printers. It would print an entire line at nearly the same instant with 132 mechanical actuators. We went through a lot of green bar paper.

The weather forcasting did a lot of number crunching, so we used a Cray X-MP as a "math co-processor" to our mainframes. what a machine.

memories!

Re:No LEDs in 1951!

[mangu]

The Univac 1170's I worked on were built in 1978/79.

OK, I was commenting on 53-years-old Univacs...

We went through a lot of green bar paper.

In 1979 I was an engineering intern at an electric power company, in the department that did power flow calculations. In the morning, an office boy came with a dolly to carry the punched cards, he came back after lunch with a bigger dolly with the printouts. We were pretty tight in office space, so the desks were put in pairs, facing each other. One engineer got nervous with someone facing him, so he built a wall of fanfold printouts between both desks. One day, when he got back from lunch, the other guy had made a hole in the paper wall, and there he was, only his two eyes were visible, staring through through the hole...

1000 calcs per second

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Considering the bloat on some modern day OSes that isn't actually all that bad

I'll take the ENIAC anyday

[EggMan2000]

Call me old school.

ENIAC

Why CEOs shouldn't control technology

[serutan]

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1941

Nobody knows what lies on the Road Ahead.

Re:Why CEOs shouldn't control technology

[nlindstrom]

Nobody knows what lies on the Road Ahead.

Except, of course, for Bill Gates.

Re:UNIVAC emulator?

[TyrelHaveman]

Help me find the details on the machine's instruction set and all that, and I'll start writing an emulator for you.

Any relation to UNIBLAB?

[FrankieBoy]

PINGGGGG!

Mercury delay line memory

[agrippa_cash]

My father was at a conference where they had old-timers reminiscing, and one of them mentioned that the computer would produce errors because turning the lights on (or closing the door) would cause the trough of mercury to vibrate slightly. Apparently there was a needle reading the nimbus of the mercury or something. I always wondered what computer that happened to.

Sad news ... UNIVAC, dead at 53

[Professeur Shadoko]

I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Early computer UNIVAC was found dead in his Washington museum this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to geek culture. Truly an American icon.

Actually

[commodoresloat]

This posting is just a dupe of the story from 3 years ago.

Here's a good page on Fastrand (*big* hard drives)

[Richard Steiner]

Check out the following site for more information.

If you've ever wondered what hard drives were like in 1968, this might be the page for you. :-) OK, it was a drum, but it's almost the same as a disk!

at least one thing remains constant

[freakmaster]

tape drives are still slow!

Memories.....

[Audacious]

Ok, this (kind of) gives away who I am but I thought it worth it to divulge this bit of history. :-)

The first university I attended had an input/output window at the computing center (like many others). But how the i/o window got created was unique. One of the first Fastran drum memory units (weighing in around 2-4 tons) units from Univac was being slowly but surely brought down the ramp to the underground computing center. Suddenly the ropes broke and the unit went racing down the ramp. It smashed its way through the first wall, the second wall, and the smacked into the solid concrete far wall. The unit rebounded and came to rest.

After checking out the unit the tech person from Univac gave it a thumbs up. Only the end panel was dented - the unit itself still functioned perfectly. So it was wheeled on into the computing center, plugged in, and functioned for many years afterwards.

As for the two new holes? Doors were put where the unit had crashed through the walls thus creating the input/output window for the underground computing center. :-)

The Fastran drum system (if I remember correctly) ran at about the speed of a 33rpm record player and took quite a while to seek for any given record. I believe it took about 1/10 of a second to read or write any record.

This is where the Brits ...

[Open Council]

Remind you that the LEO [Lyons Electronic Office] was the first real "commercial" computer ... in that it did commercial/business work .. 53 years ago it was processing bakery orders and development of stock-control software was in progress.

being the first required the invention of a number of other computing aspects such as line-printers and fast tape input.

UNIVAC may have been produced commercially but it was used by mathermaticians.

The Guinness Book of Records

[Open Council]

awarded this certificate to end the arguements.

LEO

[GCU Friendly Fire]

the first computer designed for business use. Possibly. I believed the first business actually to use a computer was the Lyons company, which ran its bakeries valuation program on LEO in November, 1951.

Re:I started my career on Univac / Unisys

[gezerk]

OBTW, I believe IPL is the TLA for Initial Program Load.

P.S. TLA is the TLA for three letter acronyms.

The Brits invented the computer

[Open Council]

and the Yanks invented the bug !

Re:The Brits invented the computer

[DarkKnightRadick]

Punch card machines are recognized as being the first mechanical computer and they were invented by IBM in the USA

Re:The Brits invented the computer

[Open Council]

If we are talking mechanical here, then it is usually recognised that Charles Babbage's "Analytical Engine" was the first mechanical computer long before IBM came into existence selling punched card "collators". Babbage's earlier "Difference Engine" was not general purpose, having been designed to calculate mathematical tables. There is an IBM link in how Babbage programmed his computer (rather ADA lovelace did the programming). The Jacquard Mechanical Loom used punched cards to control the pattern woven into the cloth. Babbage decided to use these punched cards as his imput mechanism, an idea later taken up by IBM.

Of course there are those who would say that Babbage got the idea for his computer from examining Thomas Fowler's earlier wooden calculator

Re:The Brits invented the computer

[DarkKnightRadick]

The first calculator is generally recognized to be the Abacus.

My first computer game

[EdlinUser]

I played NIM on a Braniac about 1958. It was six rotating switches; programmed by altering the studs and jumpers. The manual had a nice section on logic and switching circuits and lots of programming projects.

CSIRAC on display in Melbourne, Australia

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Guinness Bias?

[BeaverCleaver]

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.

Re:Bill Gates

[serutan]

Yep, that's why I capitalized Road Ahead ;-)
I don't think he knows either.

UNIVAC? WTF?

[Pan T. Hose]

UNIVAC? UNIVAC I? It is 2004, people! Everyone is using MULTIVAC, get over it!

Universal Automatic Computer? WTF?

[Pan T. Hose]

Universal Automatic Computer? I believe "UNIVAC" stands for "Universal Anallog Computer," does it not? Also, the "-vac" in "UNIVAC" is a reference to "vac-" in "vacuum tubes," why isn't it stated in the summary? Wouldn't "Automatic Computer" be little bit redundant, anyway?

Is This /. or PTI?

[LittleGuy]

If there is an issue to celebrate anniversaries when it's chronologically cool, maybe Slashdot should have a "Happy Time" section like Pardon the Interruption.

or at least tinge CowboyNeal in red.