UNIVAC

The UNIVAC or Universal Automatic Computer was the first commercially available computer. The UNIVAC I was designed by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly who also created the ENIAC. The first client for Eckert and Mauchly's new computer company was the United States Census Bureau. The Bureau wanted a new computer that could handle the growing U.S. population and on April 1946 gave a deposit of $300,000 for research into the UNIVAC. Eckert and Mauchly almost went into bankruptcy due to the economics of the situation but was bailed out by Remington Rand Inc. who bought out the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. The first UNIVAC was delivered to the United States Census Bureau on March 31, 1951. The UNIVAC was able to handle numbers and alphabetical characters equally well. The UNIVAC was 25 feet by 50 feet length and used 5,600 tubes, 18,000 crystal diodes, and 300 relays. The UNIVAC was a direct competitor to IBM and their computing equipment for businesses. The UNIVAC was able to input data much faster with magnetic tape than IBM's punch card technology. The UNIVAC was used to predict the 1952 presidential election in which it correctly predicted that Eisenhower would win. The first commercial purchase of the UNIVAC was the Prudential Insurance Company. The original UNIVAC is now in the Smithsonian.

This was a UNIVAC console area.

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