The personal computers of today are slick and savvy, performing countless operations seemingly at ease. Given the way in which technology has progressed, it seems unfathomable that early computers were giants, to say the least. 

To put it another way, the granddad of the computers that you and I use today came about during our grandparents time only. The scale and speed at which tech has improved has seen these room-sized devices shrink so small, all while becoming more efficient and capable of multitasking even better! One of the earliest successful commercial computers was the UNIVAC I, which was unveiled to the world in 1951. 

The men behind the machine

The need for computing is probably as old as counting and the search for mechanical devices that aided computation go back to ancient times. Fast forward to the age of computers, and it isn’t easy to answer the question “who invented the digital computer?” The UNIVAC, which stands for Universal Automatic Computer, certainly isn’t the answer, though it did play a pivotal role in taking computers from merely research and military purposes, to commercial, civilian applications.

One of the answers for the question posed is American inventor John Vincent Atanasoff as he came up with the Atanasoff Berry Computer (ABC) along with his graduate student Clifford Edward Berry by 1941. Inspired and influenced by Atanasoff’s work, American electrical engineer J. Presper Eckert and American physicist John Mauchly got to work.

Mauchly was vocal about electricity’s ability to calculate at high speeds. In one of his proposals to build a computer during the World War II, Mauchly conjectured that “A great gain in the speed of calculation can be obtained if the devices that are used employ electronic means... because the speed of such devices can be made very much higher than that of any mechanical devices.”

Between 1943 and 1946, Eckert and Mauchly built the first large-scale, general-purpose electronic digital computer. This computer was called the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC in short. 

Primarily funded by the U.S. Army Ordnance Department under the U.S. Army Department, the ENIAC was formally dedicated in February 1946. Built at a cost of nearly $500,000 (about $7 million today), the ENIAC was thus the result of military folks wanting a better way to calculate their artillery firing tables!

Gains and losses

The success of their ENIAC prompted Eckert and Mauchly to go into private business. They were soon about to find out that starting out on a venture wasn’t quite the same thing as putting together a computer. Through the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, the duo went on to realise that while they were able engineers, the same couldn’t be said about them as businessmen.

While they had been working with the ENIAC project, Mauchly had met with several Census Bureau officials. During their discussions, Mauchly was able to stress upon the idea of non-military applications for electronic computing devices. 

With that groundwork done, the duo were able to obtain a study contract from the National Bureau of Standards in 1946 to start work on a computer that could be used by the Census Bureau. What started as a six month study ended up taking a year, and the results were the specifications of the UNIVAC.

They started building the UNIVAC in 1948, but financial distress forced them to sell their struggling company to Remington Rand, an office equipment company, in 1950. Despite these hurdles, the machine was built and a contract for it was signed by the Census Bureau on March 31, 1951. 

On June 14 the same year, the Census Bureau conducted a dedication ceremony for the UNIVAC I, making it the first commercially produced electronic digital computer in the U.S. It missed out on being the world’s first commercially available general-purpose computer by a matter of months, as the University of Manchester had taken delivery of the Ferranti Mark 1 only in February. 

The election night turnaround

UNIVAC I came to the public’s attention in 1952 when Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) employed one of these devices for their election night coverage. In the run between Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower and Democratic Adlai Stevenson, CBS tasked UNIVAC I with predicting the outcome of the presidential election. 

The reporter attached with the UNIVAC introduced it as CBS went about it as a kind of a gimmick, a sideshow with a computer while the main act was the election result. Early in the evening, things were supposedly not going well for UNIVAC as it didn’t provide responses despite having been asked for predictions. This kept happening a number of times.

The reality, however, was rather different. While this was just a gimmick for CBS, a lot was riding on it for Remington Rand. As UNIVAC was a machine, it had promptly given responses every time it had been questioned. But these had been held back, probably by the programmers themselves, as the prediction seemed rather ridiculous to them.

Early in the night, when just about 3 million votes had been counted, UNIVAC gave Eisenhower overwhelming odds (100 to 1) to win the election. In fact, when the computer printout was revealed hours later, it read: It’s awfully early, but I’ll go out on a limb ... The chances are now 00 to 1 in favor of the election of Eisenhower.” Notice that the printout reads 00 as opposed to 100, as the programmers had not even fathomed such odds and didn’t think that more than two digits would be needed!

American broadcaster Edwin R. Murrow probably best summed it up during CBS’s live broadcast, saying something that has now gone on to become a popular phrase: “The trouble with machines is people.” Even as we still grapple with the gravitas of that statement in the age of artificial intelligence (AI), Murrow had elevated UNIVAC into a cult icon with that single sentence. 

In the years that followed, UNIVAC I became the first computer to be widely used for commercial and civilian purposes. Nearly 50 such devices were built, each at a cost of nearly a $1-1.5 million (about $15 million today), with major corporations like General Electric and Prudential Insurance purchasing them. 

While it might look like a hefty price tag for a single computer, it paved the way for their utilisation and the revolution that followed. As the vacuum tubes that powered the UNIVAC I made way for transistors, integrated circuits, and microprocessors, the computers have shrunk in size, while excelling in their abilities. 

What made the UNIVAC I tick?

In 1947, Eckert and Mauchly applied for a U.S. patent for a mercury delay line and obtained it in 1953. This is considered as one of the first reliable computer memory system. 

Using these greatly reduced the number of vacuum tubes that the device required, thereby minimising the space that the computer needed. The UNIVAC I employed a little over 5,000 vacuum tubes nevertheless. 

When compared to computers of its time, the UNIVAC I was rather small – it was only about the size of a garage that can take in just one car. You read that right! Computer sizes were so huge at that time that a device that took up just a room was considered small.