UNIVAC I
The UNIVAC I ( Universal Automatic Computer I) was the first commercial computer produced in the United States. It was developed by John Presper Eckert and John Mauchly of the William Eckert Mauchly Computer Corporation and built by the computer company Remington Rand.
The first UNIVAC was delivered on 30 May 1951 the United States Census Bureau and put into operation on June 14. On 1 February 1952, the U.S. Air Force received a UNIVAC I. The fifth was CBS in 1952 to predict the presidential election results. With a sample size of only seven percent, he calculated the correct result: Eisenhower will win by a large majority.
The UNIVAC I consisted of 5,200 tubes, 18,000 crystal diodes, and weighed up to 13 tons, needed an electrical output of up to 125 kilowatts and could perform 1905 operations per second. The runtime storage of mercury comprised 4.3 m × 2.4 m × 2.6 m. The access time was 40-404 microseconds. The entire system needed a footprint of 35.5 square meters.
Man delay lines used for dynamic data storage. They consisted of a mercury tube at both ends thereof, a quartz oscillator was mounted. If the quartz excited by a short current pulse to vibrate, then the ultrasonic waves generated planted in mercury with the propagation speed of two kilometers per second continuously. After a delay time corresponding to the pressure rise of the waves on the other quartz crystal produced a voltage Sann Stieg. Now the sending quartz has been refreshed with corresponding power surges synchronism with the clock of the calculator (similar to DRAM), so could a serial bit pattern of a certain length circulate any length in the mercury. In this way, the storage takes place in mercury by sound waves.
The main memory 1000 words summed up with twelve decimal places (including one for the sign ). The command list included 45 different commands, which two commands were each encoded in a word.
The American Federal Bureau to conduct censuses received a second machine in October 1954. The initial price of 159,000 U.S. dollars climbed to 1.5 million U.S. dollars and was too high for most universities. There were only three machines donated to U.S. universities.
The first UNIVAC I in Germany was officially opened on 19 October 1956 by Carl Hammer, Director of the Battelle Institute in Frankfurt, in operation. The inauguration of the first European data center of Remington Rand considered as the start of commercial data processing and in particular the DV training in Germany. It was operated in shifts of twelve to 20 people. Free computational resources on the UNIVAC I was then let for 1470 marks per hour.
A total of 46 UNIVAC-I-M achines were built and delivered.