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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
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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!
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.
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!!!!"
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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!
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
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.
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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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!
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.