UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) was a line of electronic digital stored-program computers starting with the products of the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation. After capturing the public imagination with the use of the UNIVAC I during the 1952 US Presidential election, it was decided to extend the branding to all machines made by the other computing divisions of the Remington Rand company (Engineering Research Associates and the Norwalk Laboratory of Remington Rand).
After the merger of Remington Rand with the Sperry Corporation (under name of Sperry Rand) in 1955, it was decided to merge all three divisions along with Remington Rand's tabulator division into one unified organization under the name of the Univac division. This name persisted until the mid-1980s when it was renamed to the Sperry Computer Systems Division; the last UNIVAC-badged system was the UNIVAC 1100/90, which was announced in 1982 and first shipped in late 1983.
History and structure
J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly built the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering between 1943 and 1946. A 1946 patent rights dispute with the university led Eckert and Mauchly to depart the Moore School to form the Electronic Control Company, later renamed Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC), based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. That company first built a computer called BINAC (BINary Automatic Computer) for Northrop Aviation (which was little used, or perhaps not at all). Afterwards, the development of UNIVAC began in April 1946. UNIVAC was first intended for the Bureau of the Census, which paid for much of the development, and then was put in production.
With the death of EMCC's chairman and chief financial backer Henry L. Straus in a plane crash on October 25, 1949, EMCC was sold to typewriter, office machine, electric razor, and gun maker Remington Rand on February 15, 1950. Eckert and Mauchly now reported to Leslie Groves, the retired army general who had previously managed building The Pentagon and led the Manhattan Project.
The most famous UNIVAC product was the UNIVAC I mainframe computer of 1951, which became known for predicting the outcome of the 1952 United States presidential election: this incident is noteworthy because the computer correctly predicted an Eisenhower landslide over Adlai Stevenson, whereas the final Gallup poll had Eisenhower winning the popular vote 51–49 in a close contest.
The prediction led CBS's news boss in New York, Siegfried Mickelson, to believe the computer was in error, and he refused to allow the prediction to be read. Instead, the crew showed some staged theatrics that suggested the computer was not responsive, and announced it was predicting 8–7 odds for an Eisenhower win (the actual prediction was 100–1 in his favor).
When the predictions proved trueEisenhower defeated Stevenson in a landslide, with UNIVAC coming within 3.5% of his popular vote total and four votes of his Electoral College totalCharles Collingwood, the on-air announcer, announced that they had failed to believe the earlier prediction.
The United States Army requested a UNIVAC computer from Congress in 1951. Colonel Wade Heavey explained to the Senate subcommittee that the national mobilization planning involved multiple industries and agencies: "This is a tremendous calculating process...there are equations that can not be solved by hand or by electrically operated computing machines because they involve millions of relationships that would take a lifetime to figure out." Heavey told the subcommittee it was needed to help with mobilization and other issues similar to the invasion of Normandy that were based on the relationships of various groups.
The UNIVAC was manufactured at Remington Rand's former Eckert-Mauchly Division plant on W Allegheny Avenue in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Remington Rand also had an engineering research lab in Norwalk, Connecticut, and later bought Engineering Research Associates (ERA) in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1953 or 1954 Remington Rand merged their Norwalk tabulating machine division, the ERA "scientific" computer division, and the UNIVAC "business" computer division into a single division under the UNIVAC name. This severely annoyed those who had been with ERA and with the Norwalk laboratory.
In 1955 Remington Rand merged with Sperry Corporation to become Sperry Rand. General Douglas MacArthur, then the chairman of the Board of Directors of Remington Rand, was chosen to continue in that role in the new company. Harry Franklin Vickers, then the President of Sperry Corporation, continued as president and CEO of Sperry Rand. The UNIVAC division of Remington Rand was renamed the Remington Rand Univac division of Sperry Rand. William Norris was put in charge as Vice-President and General Manager reporting to the President of the Remington Rand Division (of Sperry Rand).
The following is a list of the General Managers/Presidents of the Division. There was some degree of internal organisation turmoil from the period of the creation of Sperry Rand in 1955 right into the early 1960s. This culminated in the resignation of William Norris in 1957 and would continue until the early 1960s with the decentralisation of the former Remington Group and the promotion of UNIVAC to a full division of Sperry Rand.
# Name Years in office Title 1 William Norris 1955-1957 Vice-President & General Manager UNIVAC Division 2 Thornton C. Fry 1957-1959 Vice-President & General Manager UNIVAC Division 3 Jay W. Schnackel 1959-1962 Vice-President & General Manager UNIVAC Division 4 Dr. Louis T. Rader 1962-1964 President of the UNIVAC Division 5 J. Frank Forster 1964-1966 President of the UNIVAC Division 6 Robert E. McDonald 1966-1971 President of the UNIVAC Division 7 Gerald G. Probst 1971–1978 President of the UNIVAC Division 8 Richard l. Gehring 1978-1981 President of the UNIVAC Division 9 Joseph J. Kroger 1981-1985 President of the UNIVAC / Sperry Computer Systems Division.
In the 1960s, UNIVAC was one of the eight major American computer companies in an industry then referred to as "IBM and the seven dwarfs" – IBM being by far the largest, trailed by Burroughs, Univac, NCR, CDC, GE, RCA, and Honeywell. After GE sold its computer business to Honeywell and RCA sold its to Univac, the play on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was changed to the remaining small firms being known as the "BUNCH" (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, and Honeywell).
During the 1960s Univac was involved in work on automating Air Traffic Control, the first trial system of the "Automated Radar Terminal System" (ARTS-I) was installed in Atlanta, followed by ARTS-IA system in New York, both of these systems were built around a UNIVAC 418 minicomputer. In 1969 the Federal Aviation Administration awarded a fixed-price multi-year contract to Univac Federal Systems Division for the installation of 64 ARTS III systems. Each installation consisted of three subsystems, namely the Data acquisition subsystem, the Data processing subsystem and the Data Entry and display subsystem. Burroughs Corporation received the subcontract for the Data acquisition subsystem, while the Data Entry and Display subsystem was subcontracted to Texas Instruments. The Data processing system was built around the 30-bit Univac 8303 IOP (I/O Processor) which could be configured in a multiprocessor configuration, depending on the specific Air traffic control site (New York had the largest) These systems would continue in service well into the 1990s.
In 1977, Sperry Rand purchased Varian Data Machines so as to enter the minicomputer market. Varian would be renamed as the Sperry UNIVAC Minicomputer Operation, operating as part of the Sperry UNIVAC division. Sperry UNIVAC would continue to market the V77 but never made a significant dent in the minicomputer market.
To assist "corporate identity" the name was changed to Sperry Univac, along with Sperry Remington, Sperry New Holland, etc. In 1978, Sperry Rand, a conglomerate of various divisions (computers, typewriters, office furniture, hay balers, manure spreaders, gyroscopes, avionics, radar, electric razors), decided to concentrate solely on its computing interests and all of the unrelated divisions were sold. The company dropped the Rand from its title and reverted to Sperry Corporation. By 1981 Sperry Univac was the largest of Sperry's operating divisions, in that year it brought in revenues of $2.7 billion. Subsequently the distinct Sperry UNIVAC branding was dropped and the division was renamed as the Sperry Computer Systems Division. In 1986, Sperry Corporation merged with Burroughs Corporation to become Unisys.
After the 1986 merger of Burroughs and Sperry, Unisys evolved from a computer manufacturer to a computer services and outsourcing firm, competing at that time in the same marketplace as IBM, Electronic Data Systems (EDS), and Computer Sciences Corporation.
, Unisys continues to design and manufacture enterprise class computers with the ClearPath server lines.
Models
In the course of its history, UNIVAC produced a number of separate model ranges. One early UNIVAC line of vacuum tube computers was based on the ERA 1101 and those models built at ERA were rebadged as UNIVAC 110x; despite the 1100 model numbers, they were not related to the latter 1100/2200 series. The 1103A is credited in the literature as the first computer to have interrupts.
The original model range was the UNIVAC I (UNIVersal Automatic Computer I), the second commercial computer made in the United States. The main memory consisted of tanks of liquid mercury implementing delay-line memory, arranged in 1,000 words of 12 alphanumeric characters each. The first machine was delivered on 31 March 1951.
The Remington Rand 409 was a control panel programmed punched card calculator, designed in 1949, and sold in two models: the UNIVAC 60 (1952) and the UNIVAC 120 (1953).
The UNIVAC File Computer was first shipped in 1956. It was equipped with between one and ten large drums each holding 180,000 Alphanumeric characters. One early application was for an airline reservations system, which was used by Eastern Air Lines. It competed mainly against the IBM 650 and the IBM 305 RAMAC and a total of 130 were manufactured.
The UNIVAC II was an improvement to the UNIVAC I that UNIVAC first delivered in 1958. The improvements included magnetic (non-mercury) core memory of 2,000 to 10,000 words, UNISERVO II tape drives, which could use either the old UNIVAC I metal tapes or the new PET film tapes, and some circuits that were transistorized (although it was still a vacuum-tube computer). It was fully compatible with existing UNIVAC I programs for both code and data. The UNIVAC II also added some instructions to the UNIVAC I's instruction set.
The UNIVAC Solid State was a 2-address, decimal computer, with memory on a rotating drum with 5,000 signed 10-digit words, aimed at the general-purpose business market. It came in two versions: the Solid State 80 (IBM-Hollerith 80-column cards) and the Solid State 90 (Remington-Rand 90-column cards). This computer used magnetic logic, not transistors, because the transistors then available had highly variable characteristics and were not sufficiently reliable. Magnetic logic gates were based on magnetic cores with multiple wire windings; unlike vacuum tubes, they were solid-state devices and had a virtually infinite lifetime. The magnetic gates required drive pulses of current produced by a transmitter-type vacuum tube, of a type still used in amateur radio final amplifiers. Thus the Solid State depended, at the heart of its operations, on a vacuum tube, however, only a few tubes were required, instead of thousands, greatly increasing reliability.