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It's funny. Laugh. Hardware

Happy Birthday, UNIVAC I 241

Posted by Hemos from the that's-a-lot-of-candles dept.
Daniel Goldman writes "Today is the 53rd birthday of the UNIVAC I (UNIVersal Automatic Computer I). The UNIVAC I was delivered to the Census Bureau in 1951. It weighed some 16,000 pounds, used 5,000 vacuum tubes, and could perform about 1,000 calculations per second. It was the first American commercial computer, as well as the first computer designed for business use. The first few sales were to government agencies, the A.C. Nielsen Company, and the Prudential Insurance Company. It could retain a maximum of 1000 numbers and was able to add, subtract, multiply, divide, sort, collate and take square and cube roots. Its transfer write/read to and from magnetic tape was 10,000 characters per second."
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Happy Birthday, UNIVAC I More

Happy Birthday, UNIVAC I

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  • That would make a great story... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by lightspawn ( 155347 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @12:30PM (#9420868) Homepage
    3 years ago.

    These things don't become "news" every year.

  • where is it now? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by 2057 ( 600541 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @12:30PM (#9420870) Homepage Journal
    I'd love to see this beast live and crunching numbers... anyone, know where its grave is or if they have it running

    • Re:where is it now? (Score:5, Informative)

      by greechneb ( 574646 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @12:38PM (#9420958) Journal
      The original UNIVAC is now on display in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington

    • Re:where is it now? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Tranzig ( 786710 )
      I don't think it would worth to keep UNIVAC running, do to it's massive power consumption and need for contionus maintenance.
      Here is a site about UNIVACs today [google.com] that might be interesting for you.

    • Re:where is it now? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Rick.C ( 626083 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @12:50PM (#9421068)
      I'd love to see this beast live and crunching numbers

      Back in 1951 there were factories that pumped out vacuum tubes by the millions. That was convenient, because Univac burned out tubes by the thousands.

      Firing up an old Univac would require firing up some old tube factories, too.

      • Re:where is it now? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by bhtooefr ( 649901 ) <bhtooefr&bhtooefr,org> on Monday June 14, 2004 @12:52PM (#9421084) Homepage Journal
        What about a UNIVAC emulator? You could even hook up equivalents of the peripherals to it, and have a somewhat realistic experience without blowing tubes.

      • Re:where is it now? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @01:16PM (#9421390)
        I was reading about the U.S. airforce's SAGE systems a while ago. They built a couple of dozen of these tube-based computers that consumed ~1 megawatt each. The last ones weren't taken offline until the 1980s.

        The funny part is that these were built to coordinate air defenses against a Soviet bomber strike, but towards the end of their life they had to buy replacement tubes from countries in the Soviet bloc because they were the only places that still manufactured them.

      • Back in 1951 there were factories that pumped out vacuum tubes by the millions. That was convenient, because Univac burned out tubes by the thousands.

        Firing up an old Univac would require firing up some old tube factories, too.

        All this talk is making it sound as though tubes are inherently unreliable. I'm betting that there wasn't a whole lot of forced air cooling in this beast, and heat *will* eventually get tubes, just like other electronics.

        I've had tube based electronics run for years on end withou

    • Re:where is it now? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ackthpt ( 218170 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @12:58PM (#9421146) Homepage Journal
      I'd love to see this beast live and crunching numbers... anyone, know where its grave is or if they have it running

      When my Explorer Post was given an old computer to play with (a DEC PDP-3) we found, after getting it to do a few simple things, that disposing of it even in the late 70's was a hazardous/toxic waste issue. As "Love Canal" had already met with public attention, and commercial electrolytes showing up in cattle, we had either the choice of paying transporation to send it to a museum which would have taken it or pay to dispose of it. Since Dow was our Post sponsor, they were willing to bundle it up with other electronic gear for proper disposal.

      As much as these old beasts are fascinating, they're a pain to get rid of.

    • Re:where is it now? (Score:4, Funny)

      by john82 ( 68332 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @01:08PM (#9421252)
      My wife works for Prudential's former mortgage business unit (since acquired by a certain stagecoach company). Judging from the interface and performance (or lack thereof), I think I can say without equivocation that Prudential's UNIVAC is still in service.

      The other giveaway is the large coal chute on the back side of the building.

    • Re:where is it now? - Dino-iron is not extinct yet (Score:5, Informative)

      by xmark ( 177899 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @01:09PM (#9421264)
      Here's a great freeware UNIVAC simulator [simtel.net] you can use until you get your own UNIVAC off eBay. MTBF on those babies was somewhere around 10 hours due to the use of vacuum tubes...hopefully your PC running this sim will post somewhat better reliability numbers. :D If you'd like to see some dino-iron in person, a similar-era ENIAC resides in a basement museum in the Engineering School at the University of Michigan. This page [ed-thelen.org] is full of good information and links. Also, check out this list [ed-thelen.org] if you're interested in restorations of other ancient machines such as Crays and Cybers; my favorites are the Royal-McBee LGP 21 and 30 machines, immortalized in the Jargon File [catb.org] mythologies about Real Programmers. Read The Story of Mel [catb.org] and be enlightened (as well as entertained) about how a True Master thinks when dealing with the limitations of old hardware. It's so Zen it will make you clap with one hand.
      • a similar-era ENIAC resides in a basement museum in the Engineering School at the University of Michigan

        You beat me to it. I wanted bragging rights! Is it in a basement museum now? It used to be in the EECS bldg right in an inset in one of the halls. Well, I suppose the entire thing was not there, I imagine it would be too big.

    • Re:where is it now? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by MdotCpDeltaT ( 744490 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @01:09PM (#9421270)
      My dad used to do tech service on the Univac in Kansas City at the USDA building. (It took an entire building to just hold the computer.) One Christmas he took me on a tour of the computer. They had programmed the different pieces of equipment to make their distinct noises to play Christmas Carols. Also got a real tour of the computer - from the inside. We walked through one area where I was told that if I tripped, to grab a cable that would cut the power to the computer to keep from get electricuted when I hit the tubes. All in all a pretty fascinating tour,

  • 1000 numbers (Score:5, Funny)

    by Quill_28 ( 553921 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @12:31PM (#9420876) Journal
    Yes, but what is the range of those numbers?

    • Re:1000 numbers (Score:5, Informative)

      by mikael ( 484 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @12:46PM (#9421034)
      From The Case 1107 [fourmilab.ch]

      The central processor was a 36 bit architecture, capable of executing most simple arithmetic instructions in one 4 microsecond cycle time. Multiplication of two 36-bit integers took 12 microseconds, and division of a 72-bit dividend by a 36-bit divisor 31.3 microseconds. The processor performed 36-bit single precision floating point arithmetic in hardware, but did not implement double precision floating point.

      From Univac I [ed-thelen.org]

      The UNIVAC's word size was 72 data bits, which held eleven digits plus a sign, plus one parity bit for each six data bits, giving a total of 84. The mercury delay line memory amounted to 1000 words. Besides numbers, the UNIVAC could represent alphanumeric data (letters of the alphabet and some punctuation marks) using six bits for each character with twelve characters to the word. Codes were assigned for the letters of the alphabet and punctuation marks, such as 010100 for A, 010101 for B, 010110 for C and so on.
      According to Why do We need a floating-point arithmetic standard? [berkeley.edu]

      Univac 110x float:

      Underflow limit = 2^-129 ~ 1.5 x 10^-39
      Overflow limit = 2^27 ~ 1.7 x 10^8
      • Just out of curiosity, how does this compare to the capabilities of an entry level PDA?

      • Re:1000 numbers (Score:2, Informative)

        by k_yarina ( 732607 )
        The 1107 was not the Univac I, nor was the architecture similar. The story goes that Univac numbered their machines from 1 to 12. They didn't want to call something the Univac 13, so they named it the 1101, or 13 in binary. The 1101 evolved into the 1107, 1108, etc, and still lives on as the 2200 series. The Univac FASTRAND II drum, supposedly made of machined sewer pipe, was used on the early 1100 machines. It had 192 positions of 64 tracks of 64 sectors of 36 bit words each, and was the primary stora
        • My mistake. From this page [ed-thelen.org], It still looks the Univac I had the precision of 12 decimal places?
        • I never worked with Fastrands, but was told that they took hours to rotate up to speed and that they often lost data with 'bad spots'.
          You missed something, each Fastrand sector was 28 words of 36 bits.

          That user's manual for the Univac I is amazing - 1000 (decimal) words of memory.

      • Re:1000 numbers (Score:4, Informative)

        by mikael ( 484 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @01:39PM (#9421664)
        The original manual can be found at bitsavers.org [bitsavers.org].
      • My father was at a conference where they had old-timers reminiscing, and one of them mentioned that the computer would produce errors because turning the lights on (or closing the door) would cause the trough of mercury to vibrate slightly. Apparently there was a needle reading the nimbus of the mercury or something. I always wondered what computer that happened to.

  • Well, (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 14, 2004 @12:31PM (#9420878)
    Was it so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe could afford it?

    • Re:Well, (Score:3, Funny)

      by soft_guy ( 534437 )
      Was it so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe could afford it?

      No. You must be thinking of the Apple Lisa.

  • And yet (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 14, 2004 @12:32PM (#9420890)
    after all these years, it STILL doesn't have decent 3D hardware support video drivers! Bastards!

  • I remember UNIVAC I (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @12:35PM (#9420914) Homepage
    I wrote about this [slashdot.org] back on the 50th anniversary.

  • I started my career on Univac / Unisys (Score:4, Interesting)

    by uid100 ( 540265 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @12:35PM (#9420922)
    What a great experience - a punch card reader was right next to the disk cache cabinet. Univac consoles are still my favorite "clicky" style keyboards. The Univac 1170 had dials for choosing the tape drive for IPL, switches for the memory banks and a small black button to initiate the IPL. Lots of flashing LED's to tell us what was going on. This was to support weather forcasting in the USAF.

    • No LEDs in 1951! (Score:5, Informative)

      by mangu ( 126918 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @02:24PM (#9422177)
      Those little lamps weren't LEDs, probably they were neon lamps. In hardware with a lot of vacuum tubes, burned filaments were the most common problem. To help find the burned tubes, they put the filaments in series of ten or so tubes, with a neon lamp in parallel with each tube. The operating filament voltage wasn't enough to turn on the neon lamp, but when a filament burned, the full voltage for all the series appeared across the terminals of the burned tube and the neon lighted up.

  • Yes that's good and all (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 14, 2004 @12:35PM (#9420923)
    but this doesn't help much.
    Its transfer rate to and from magnetic tape was 10,000 characters per second.
    How many Libraries of Congress is that??

    /totally serious

  • Some more specs/info (Score:5, Informative)

    by fuzzix ( 700457 ) <flippy@example.com> on Monday June 14, 2004 @12:36PM (#9420927) Journal
    from the venerable old-computers.com [old-computers.com]
    • Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see a mention of these facts or power specs anywhere at old-computers.com or in the links from the post:

      - The UNIVAC became famous when it was use by the US Census Bureau to calculate the results of the 1952 presidential election.

      - The number of vacuum tubes was reduced fmor about 19,000 to 5,000, therefore reducing the power consumption from 175 kilowatts to 100 kilowatts (!), and also reducing the size and weight. (In comparison, your PC probably has a 200-500Watt p

  • Whats new? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Mz6 ( 741941 ) *
    Soo.. Whats new about it? More importantly, whats been added? Does it come pre-installed with Duke Nuken Forever? *ducks*

  • UNIVAC = Johnny-come-lately (Score:5, Informative)

    by Aardpig ( 622459 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @12:38PM (#9420946)

    ...this message brought to you courtesy of the memory of LEO [leo-computers.org.uk].

    Of course, like all British technological innovation, any lead over the rest of the world was quickly thrown away by an incompetent government and business sector.

  • The UNIVAC I was delivered to the Census Bureau in 1951. It weighed some 16,000 pounds, used 5,000 vacuum tubes, and could perform about 1,000 calculations per second.

    heh. when I was a kid and first heard about UNIVAC, I thought the name meant that it used one vacuum tube.

  • Correct Acronym Explanation? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    An IBM IT dictionary from the late 1980's I once owned translated it as UNIVersal ACcounting machine.

  • Has anyone tried... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Len Budney ( 787422 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @12:38PM (#9420956)
    Building one of these using transistors? It should reduce maintenance costs, and the leftover power would meet all the energy needs of the museum it lives in, plus the surrounding towns.

    • Re:Has anyone tried... (Score:2, Informative)

      by orcmid ( 122810 )
      Well yes, there was a Univac II and the first full-up transistorized (and core memory for RAM) model was called Univac III although it wasn't compatible. There was emulator software to help people convert Univac I/II programs to the Univac III.

      The Univac III was roughly contemporaneous with the Univac 1107. There would be no Univac IV. The 1107 line continued long into the Unisys regime. The Univac III lacked a scalable architecture and died against the System/360 and movement to plug-compatible system

  • Univac was called "Univac" (Score:3, Funny)

    by callipygian-showsyst ( 631222 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @12:39PM (#9420965) Homepage
    because it had just one Vacuum Tube. That's why Asimov [asimovonline.com] had to develop Multivac.

  • A time when anything was possible (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Lord Grey ( 463613 ) * on Monday June 14, 2004 @12:39PM (#9420967)
    UNIVAC's possibilities fired the imagination. Science fiction writers populated magazines and books with powerful computers, based on what they knew of UNIVAC. Pretty cool stuff, if you don't think it's quaint.

    BTW, one of the best short stories along those lines was Isaac Asimov's The Last Question [dyndns.org] (published in Nine Tomorrows [barnesandnoble.com] among other places). The focus isn't really the computer, but it shows how people were thinking about these new-fangled gadgets at the time.

  • Not the first business computer (Score:3, Informative)

    by dave420 ( 699308 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @12:39PM (#9420974)
    The LEO, Lyons' Electronic Office, was built earlier in 1951...

    Here [leo-computers.org.uk] is a site with some history. Apparently, they started on it back in '47. Lyons was originally a tea shop in London, before they branched out into computing.

    • ...Krispy Kreme, manufacturer of premium farinaceous products, have announced the construction of a new supercomputer. The device, which will contain 1729 million AMD Opteron CPUs, linked to 1 terabyte of 2 picosecond RAM via a 1 Exabit/s bus, will be used to model the diffusive transport of coffee throughout glazed doughnuts.

  • Edmund C. Berkeley (Score:5, Informative)

    by Nakito ( 702386 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @12:40PM (#9420980)
    This would also be a good time to remember Edmund C. Berkeley. He was an insurance executive (an actuary, I believe) who saw the commercial possibilities of the digital computer at a time when it was generally regarded as only an expensive military tool. He was instrumental in convincing Prudential to buy the Univac I. He then left the insurance industry and became the first advocate of computer education, developing some great logic toys (e.g., the Brainiac, the Geniac) and writing some great books for students (e.g., Giant Brains, Symbolic Logic and Intelligent Machines). He was one of the founding editors of Computers and Animation. Berkeley rocked.
  • Did UNIVAC's mother need stitches?

    Seriously, do we really need to anthropomorphize machines this much? It was popular to do in the fifties and sixties, but aren't we over that by now?

    Bork!

  • Seems like a little.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by www.sorehands.com ( 142825 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @12:46PM (#9421038) Homepage
    [soapbox mode on]

    The computing power is low as compared to today's standards, but people forget that the basic principals that apply to developing software for mainframes of 20,30,40 years ago still should apply to developing software for PCs today.


    Efficient, well designed, clean code should apply to code today as it did 20 years ago.

    [soapbox mode off]

    • >people forget that the basic principals that apply to developing software for mainframes of 20,30,40 years ago still should apply to developing software for PCs today.

      You still have team meetings about the correct way to number your punchcards?
  • Ok, who can make 53 years a significant (ie round number) anniversary? I guess it's easy enough if you count in Base-5.3 notation. What planet would you have to be on in order for a 53-earth year observance to correspond to a meaningful celestial event relative to your system?

    • The Univac was definitely not speedy. You would want to celebrate speed, so you would think of something fast, such as the fastest planet: Mercury. However, you also want something terrestrial, so you look at 220 [220.com]. Of course! Here's the importance:

      220 years (local) to Mercury is the equivalent of 19360 earth days (one mercury year is 88 earth days)

      If you divide 19360 earth days by 365.25 (earth days in a year) you come out with the happy number of 53 years!

  • Imagine a Beowulf cluster of...

    Never mind.

  • Why don't we just put Daniel Goldman's today in old hardware history service on the front page? Pioneer 10 yesterday, Univac today... what's tomorrow?
  • Some day is the first birthday of one of my computers, leopard, that was delivered (in peices) to my house in 2003. It weighs under 20 pounds, uses no vacuum tubes, and can perform about 5,200,000,000 calculations per second (avg 2 instructions per clock cycle). It was the first >1 GHz computer in my house, as well as the first with hyperthreading technology. It can retain a maximum of 134,217,728 32-bit numbers and is able to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and thousands of other things. Its transfer r

  • I hate to have paid for this story (Score:3, Funny)

    by Omega1045 ( 584264 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @12:53PM (#9421106)
    I would feel like a real schmuck if I had paid to view this story from the mysterious future.

  • security? (Score:2, Funny)

    by darkain ( 749283 )
    how secure is this system? if i buy one, am i going to have to run "univac update" every day? or does it support automatic updates from a remote tape drive?

  • First Virus? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Inda ( 580031 ) <slash.20.inda@spamgourmet.com> on Monday June 14, 2004 @12:58PM (#9421155) Journal

    The page about the game ANIMAL brought back memories. I can't remember the name of the computer I played this on - it was about 20-25 years ago.

    I didn't know the game was a 'virus'. Very interesting.

    http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/univac/animal.ht ml [fourmilab.ch]

    • I remember seeing this program in 1979 or early 80. It was an after school session on different computers and apps from some guys our CS teacher asked in. I took my father since he was interested too. If I remeber it ran on an Atari 800 and had like three animals in it. I remember adding aardvark, Does it eat ants?.

  • Obligatory Simpsons quote (Professor Frink) (Score:3, Funny)

    by Ismenio ( 629516 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @12:59PM (#9421159) Homepage Journal
    Frink: Well, sure, the Frinkiac-7 looks impressive, don't touch it, but I predict that within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.
  • I love the story about using the UNIVAC as a morse code oscillator [fourmilab.ch]. Wouldn't that be the equivalent to using a SUN E15k to play Doom [filefront.com]?

  • Where's Ken Brown? (Score:3, Funny)

    by zymurgy_cat ( 627260 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @01:12PM (#9421316) Homepage
    I looked at that instruction set. There's no way some researchers could have written that 50+ years ago without help. I hope Mr. Brown gets on this quick and finds out who really wrote the instruction set and how it was stolen. Hell, I'll bet that bastard Linus ripped it off and put it into the first Linux kernel.

  • amazed by the specs (Score:2, Interesting)

    by xonen ( 774419 )
    Wow, i am amazed by the specifications. This 'beast' almost outperfoms my ZX-81! zx-81: 1Kb memory, tape I/O: 300bps.. only thing that is (little) faster may be effective clockspeed: 1Mhz, but i doubt if the zx-81 can take 1000 square roots in one second ;) Looks like it took microelectronics about 30 years to make a -payable- equivalent of this machine.
  • I'm pretty sure the typical AOL dialup connection is getting 10,000 characters per second on a GOOD day. Granted, the UNIVAC wasn't using a modem, but it also wasn't trying to send the latest borders to go around the same ol' content.

  • Blast from the Past (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @01:42PM (#9421693) Homepage Journal
    I ran across some of my granddad's "Lensmen" books a while back. The funny thing about those books was that our heros were capable of faster than light travel, but they had to do all their interstellar navigation using slide rules! It's always fun to see how our current understanding of the world affects our vision of the future.
    • The funny thing about those books was that our heros were capable of faster than light travel, but they had to do all their interstellar navigation using slide rules!

      This seems to be a recurring theme in classic science fiction. In James Blish's Cities in Flight novels, I remember a scene that described in passing the automated deviced that consumed the dishes from table, and recycled all the waste for the next meal.

      One of the characters was irked because the table ate his slide rule.

      Flying a City at

  • Decendant of Univac I still in production (Score:5, Informative)

    by Danathar ( 267989 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @01:52PM (#9421798) Journal
    Many people do not know that OS2200 which operates on the UNISYS Clearpath systems is a direct decendant of the original Univac OS.

    I was an operator on a 2200 class system in the early 90's.

    As mainframes go, it was pretty cool!

  • What is the plural form of UNIVAC?
  • Call me old school.

    ENIAC [janowiak.com]

  • "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1941

    Nobody knows what lies on the Road Ahead.

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