UNIVAC is the name of a business unit and division of the Remington Rand company formed by the 1950 purchase of the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, founded four years earlier by ENIAC inventors J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, and the associated line of computers which continues to this day in one of the two such lines offered by Unisys. Unisys was formed when Burroughs (whose line of computers form the other Unisys mainframe legacy line) bought Sperry which held the evolved UNIVAC division. UNIVAC is an acronym for UNIVersal Automatic Computer.
Contents |
Eckert and 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 began the development of UNIVAC. 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 Harry L. Straus in a plane crash on October 25, 1949, EMCC was sold to typewriter maker Remington Rand on February 15, 1950. Eckert and Mauchly now reported to Leslie Groves, the retired army general who had managed the Manhattan Project. Remington Rand had its own calculating machine 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.
The most famous UNIVAC product was the UNIVAC I mainframe computer of 1951, which became known for predicting the outcome of the U.S. presidential election the following year. This incident is particularly infamous because the computer predicted an Eisenhower landslide when traditional pollsters all called it for Adlai Stevenson.[1] The numbers were so skewed that CBS's news boss in New York, Mickelson, decided the computer was in error and refused to allow the prediction to be read. Instead they 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). When the predictions proved true and Eisenhower won a landslide within 1% of the initial prediction, Charles Collingwood, the on-air announcer, embarrassingly announced that they had covered up the earlier prediction.[2]
In 1955 Remington Rand merged with Sperry Corporation to become Sperry Rand. The UNIVAC division of Remington Rand was renamed the Univac division of Sperry Rand. General Douglas MacArthur was chosen to head the company. 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" — a play on Snow White and the seven dwarfs, with IBM, by far the largest, being cast as Snow White and the other seven as being dwarfs: Burroughs, Univac, NCR, CDC, GE, RCA and Honeywell.[3] In the 1970s, after GE sold its computer business to Honeywell and RCA sold its to Univac, the analogy to the seven dwarfs became less apt and the remaining small firms became known as the "BUNCH" (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, and Honeywell).
Around 1975, to assist "corporate identity" the name was changed to Sperry Univac, along with Sperry Remington, Sperry New Holland, etc. In 1978 Sperry Rand, an old fashioned conglomerate of disharmonious divisions (computers, typewriters, office furniture, hay balers, manure spreaders, gyroscopes, avionics, radar, electric razors), decided to concentrate on its computing interests and unrelated divisions were sold. The company dropped the Rand from its title and reverted back to Sperry Corporation. In 1986, Sperry Corporation merged with Burroughs Corporation to become Unisys.
Since the 1986 marriage of Burroughs and Sperry, Unisys has metamorphosed from a computer manufacturer to a computer services and outsourcing firm, competing 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 and ES7000 server lines.
In the course of its history, UNIVAC produced a number of separate model ranges.
The original model range was the UNIVAC I (UNIVersal Automatic Computer I), the first commercial computer made in the United States. The main memory consisted of tanks of liquid mercury implementing delay line memory, arranged in 1000 words of 12 alphanumeric characters each. The first machine was delivered on 31 March 1951. Successor machines included:
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 2000 to 10000 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.
Sperry Rand began shipment of UNIVAC III in 1962, and produced 96 UNIVAC III systems. Unlike the UNIVAC I and UNIVAC II, however, it was a binary machine as well as maintaining support for all UNIVAC I and UNIVAC II decimal and alphanumeric data formats for backward compatibility. This was the last of the original UNIVAC machines.
The UNIVAC Solid State was a 2-address, bi-quinary coded decimal computer, with memory on a rotating drum with 5000 signed 10 digit words. For efficiency, programmers had to take into account drum latency, the time required for a specific data item, once written, to rotate to where it could be read. It was one of the first computers to use some solid-state components. 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 machine was designated the Solid State 80-90 and sold mostly in Europe. UNIVAC SS80/90s were installed at DC Transit, SBA, CWA, in Washington DC during the early sixties. It was a follow on to a computer built for the USAF and delivered to Lawrence G. Hanscom Field, near Cambridge, MA in 1957. This computer used magnetic amplifiers, not transistors. The decision to use magnetic amplifiers was made because the point-contact germanium transistors then available had highly variable characteristics and were not sufficiently reliable. The magnetic amplifiers were based on tiny (about 1/8" ID) toroidal stainless steel spools wound with two or so layers of 1/32" wide 4-79 moly-permalloy magnetic material to form magnetic cores. These cores had two windings of #60 copper wire surrounding the 4-79 molypermalloy. The magnetic amplifiers required clock pulses of heavy current that could not be produced by the transistors of the day. A transmitting vacuum-tube, of the type used in amateur radio final amplifiers, produced a powerful high-voltage signal which was stepped down to a 36-volt, high-current clock by oil-filled transformers that were distributed about the machine. Thus the SS 80/90, for the heart of its operation, depended on the very technology it claimed to replace, a marketing tactic. The clock tube was enclosed in a shielding box that constrained both radio emissions and viewing by eyes of other than Univac's field engineers. The SS80/90 was aimed at the general purpose business market.
Early UNIVAC 1100 series models were vacuum tube computers.
The UNIVAC 1100/2200 series is a series of compatible 36-bit transistorized computer systems initially made by Sperry Rand. The series continues to be supported today by Unisys Corporation as the ClearPath Plus Dorado Series.[4]
Shortly after the 90/30 was introduced, Sperry Univac introduced the 90/25 which was the same basic hardware, however had an option for a smaller 80 column card reader and was a bit slower (it is said, that the machine executed 3 instructions and then paused to slow it down, as nearly every component was identical to the 90/30). Later a 90/40 model was added which improved upon various performance criteria such as clock rate and maximum main memory capacity.
The Sperry UNIVAC System 80 series: The entire 90/xx series was eventually replaced in 1981 by the System 80, a Sperry-badged, IBM/360-like mainframe actually developed and engineered by Mitsubishi in Japan.
The 1107 was the first 36-bit, word-oriented machine with an architecture close to that which came to be known as that of the "1100 Series." It ran the EXEC II operating system, a batch-oriented second-generation operating system, typical of the early to mid-1960s. The 1108 ran EXEC II and EXEC 8. EXEC 8 allowed simultaneous handling of real-time applications, time-sharing, and background batch work. TIP, a transaction-processing environment, allowed programs to be written in COBOL whereas similar programs on competing systems were written in assembly language. On later systems, EXEC 8 was renamed OS 1100 and OS 2200, with modern descendants maintaining backwards compatibility. Some more exotic operating systems ran on the 1108—one of which was RTOS, a more bare-bones system designed to take better advantage of the hardware.
The affordable System 80 series of small mainframes ran the OS/3 operating system which originated on the Univac 90/30 (and later 90/25, and 90/40).
The UNIVAC 90/60 Series first ran with Univac developed OS/9, which was later replaced by RCA's Virtual Memory Operating System (VMOS). RCA originally called this operating system Time Sharing Operating System (TSOS), running on RCA's Spectra 70 line of virtual memory systems and changed its name to VMOS before the Sperry acquisition of RCA CSD. After VMOS was ported to the 90/60, Univac renamed it VS/9.
UNIVAC has been, over the years, a registered trademark of: