Remington Rand and Sperry UNIVAC

The company that sold the first American commercial computer was not a technology company in any modern sense. Remington Rand was formed in 1927 by merging the Remington Typewriter Company, whose roots went back to the arms maker that first manufactured typewriters in the 1870s, with the Rand Kardex company, a maker of filing systems, and other office-equipment firms. Its business was the paperwork of large organizations.

Two acquisitions

In 1950 Remington Rand bought the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation of Philadelphia, which was building the UNIVAC and running out of money. In 1952 it bought Engineering Research Associates of St. Paul, Minnesota, a company formed after the war by Navy cryptanalysts that had developed magnetic drum memory and built computers for the government. Together these gave Remington Rand the two strongest computer engineering groups in the country.

The lead, and how it was lost

For a few years in the early 1950s the UNIVAC was the computer, and Remington Rand's lead looked secure. IBM, whose punched-card tabulators dominated business data processing, had been cautious about electronic computers. It then moved decisively. Its sales force was far larger and already called on every large organization in the country. Its customers had rooms full of IBM card equipment and staff trained to use it, and IBM's first computers were designed to fit into those rooms. Remington Rand's machines were technically excellent and arrived into offices organized around a competitor's products.

By the late 1950s IBM led the market. The 1955 merger with Sperry Corporation, a maker of gyroscopes and military electronics, brought capital but also a management that regarded computers as one division among many.

The long second act

Sperry UNIVAC remained a major computer company for three decades, with strengths in government, airlines and banking, and large operations in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania and the Twin Cities. In 1986, after a takeover contest, Sperry merged with Burroughs to form Unisys. The UNIVAC name disappeared from the market, though some of its system architectures continued in Unisys products for years afterward.

What the records show

The corporate records of Remington Rand and Sperry UNIVAC are preserved at the Hagley Museum and Library in Delaware, and the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota holds extensive material on Engineering Research Associates. Historians working in those collections continue to revise the story of why the early lead was lost, a question with no settled answer.