When Computers Filled Entire Rooms

In the spring of 1951 a machine the size of a garage was accepted by the United States Census Bureau. It was called the UNIVAC, for Universal Automatic Computer, and it was the first computer in the country built not for a laboratory or a weapons program but to be sold. The company selling it made typewriters.

A machine and a business

The UNIVAC I had its origins in ENIAC, the wartime computer built at the University of Pennsylvania and publicly unveiled in February 1946. Its two chief designers, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, left the university that year to form their own company. They had a contract from the Census Bureau and an idea that was, at the time, unusual: that computers could be a commercial product rather than a scientific instrument.

The idea nearly bankrupted them. Building the machine cost far more than the fixed-price contracts allowed. In 1950 the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation was bought by Remington Rand, a Connecticut office-machine company whose products included typewriters, adding machines and the punched-card tabulators that then did the clerical work of large organizations. Remington Rand had money, sales offices and customers. It did not yet have a computer. The acquisition gave it one.

What the machine was

The UNIVAC I used about 5,200 vacuum tubes, weighed roughly 13 tons and consumed about 125 kilowatts of power. It stored data on magnetic tape rather than punched cards, which was its real advance: a reel of tape held what would have required thousands of cards. It could perform roughly a thousand additions a second. Forty-six were built and sold, to government agencies, insurance companies, utilities and manufacturers, at prices around a million dollars each.

Election night

The UNIVAC became famous on the evening of November 4, 1952, when CBS used one to predict the presidential election from early returns. The machine projected a landslide for Dwight Eisenhower at a time when polls expected a close race. The network's producers, not trusting it, withheld the forecast until the result was clear. The machine had been right, and for a generation 'UNIVAC' meant computer in the way that a brand name sometimes becomes a word.

The industry it started

Remington Rand bought a second computer company, Engineering Research Associates of St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1952, and in 1955 merged with the Sperry Corporation to form Sperry Rand. For a few years the UNIVAC division led the market. Then IBM, which had been slower to start, used its vast sales force and its customers' existing punched-card installations to overtake it. By the 1960s the industry had the shape it would hold for decades: one dominant company and a group of smaller ones, several of them descended from Remington Rand.

The factories that built these machines were in Philadelphia, in St. Paul, in Norwalk, Connecticut and later in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. The History Desk feature linked below follows what happened to those places and the people who worked in them.