On March 31st, 1951, the UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) was delivered to the first client: the US Census Bureau. Research and development had driven the cost of that first computer to $1Million. (Their first non-government contract was for General Electric's Appliance Park facility in Louisville, Kentucky, who used the UNIVAC computer for a payroll application.) It used an operator keyboard and console typewriter for simple, or limited, input and magnetic tape for all other input and output. Printed output was recorded on tape and then printed by a separate tape printer. The UNIVAC I was designed as a commercial data-processing computer, intended to replace the punched-card accounting machines of the day. It could read 7,200 decimal digits per second (it did not use binary numbers), making it by far the fastest business machine yet built. Its use of mercury delay lines greatly reduced the number of vacuum tubes needed to "only" 5,000, allowing the main processor to occupy "only" 14.5 feet by 7.5 feet by 9 feet of space. It was a true business machine, signaling the convergence of academic computational research with the office automation trend of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As such, it ushered in the era of "Big Iron"-large, mass-produced computing equipment.
During the UNIVAC's development and competition with IBM's business computing equipment (which used punch cards), the UNIVAC was used in a publicity stunt. It involved using the UNIVAC computer to predict the results of the presidential race between Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson. To the disquietude of national pollsters expecting a Stevenson victory, the UNIVAC team predicted a huge landslide for Eisenhower, and with only five percent of the results. CBS executives didn't know what to make of this bold finding. "We saw UNIVAC as an added feature to our coverage that could be very interesting in the future," Walter Cronkite later recalled. "But I don't think that we felt the computer would become predominant in our coverage in any way."
So CBS told its audience that UNIVAC only foresaw a close race. At the end of the evening, when it was clear that UNIVAC's actual findings were spot on, a spokesperson for the company that made the machine was allowed to disclose the truth-that the real prediction had been squelched.
The uncanny accuracy of UNIVAC's prediction during a major televised event sent shock waves across the nation," notes historian Kurt W. Beyer, author of Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age. "In the months that followed, 'UNIVAC' gradually became the generic term for a computer." The computer had correctly predicted that Eisenhower would win, but the news media decided to blackout the computer's prediction and declared that the UNIVAC had been stumped. When the truth was revealed, it was considered amazing that a computer could do what political forecasters could not, and the UNIVAC quickly became a household name. The original UNIVAC now sits in the Smithsonian Institution.
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