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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."
3 years ago.
These things don't become "news" every year.
I'd love to see this beast live and crunching numbers... anyone, know where its grave is or if they have it running
For The Best Jazz/Hip-hop fusion > COlD DUCK
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!
I wrote about this back on the 50th anniversary.
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.
...yup...
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
from the venerable old-computers.com
...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.
An IBM IT dictionary from the late 1980's I once owned translated it as UNIVersal ACcounting machine.
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
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.
Or better yet, is it open source? Cause if it's not we don't want to hear about those worthless closed source systems!
because it had just one Vacuum Tube. That's why Asimov had to develop Multivac.
Best Buy can have you arrested
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.
Who cares if it runs Linux ... as long as I can mod the case!
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.
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
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]
Fight Spammers!
...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.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of...
Never mind.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
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 would feel like a real schmuck if I had paid to view this story from the mysterious future.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
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?
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
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
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.
125KW per box, we'll make a small 16-box cluster, so that's TWO MEGAWATTS! WOW!
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.
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.
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
Just last month they had the crew from "This Old House" over to do a case mod for it.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
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.
A glitch a day keeps the bugs away.
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!"
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
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.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
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.
awarded this certificate to end the arguements.
Paul
www.opencouncil.org
Open
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)