UNIVAC I
Simultaneously, the duo founded the Electronic Control Company (later renamed the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation) in Philadelphia.
[5] When the duo was given a $300,000 deposit for research by the United States Census Bureau, the conception of the UNIVAC I began in April 1946, a month after they founded their company.
"[7] In April 1947, Eckert and Mauchly created the tentative instruction code, C-1, for their potential successor model to the EDVAC, which was the earliest document on the programming of an electronic digital computer intended for commercial use.
In 1948, the company, renamed the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, secured a contract with the United States Census Bureau to begin construction on the UNIVAC I.
At the same time, Harry Straus, impressed with the development of the duo's next invention, convinced the directors of American Totalisator to invest $500,000 to shore up the financially troubled Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation.
[7] In early 1949, Betty Holberton, one of the developers of the project, made the UNIVAC Instructions Code C-10, the first software to allow a computer to be operated by keyboarded commands rather than dials and switches.
At the same time, Grace Hopper left the Harvard Computation Laboratory to join the EMCC as a senior mathematician and programmer to help develop the UNIVAC I.
Unfortunately for them, a month later, Harry Straus was killed when his twin-engine airplane crashed, causing American Totalisator to withdraw their promise of financial support.
Construction of the UNIVAC I was completed by December 1950, and it was later delivered to the United States Census Bureau in March 1951 so data could be processed more quickly and accurately.
That shortcoming hindered sales to companies concerned about the high cost of manually converting large quantities of existing data stored on cards.
[citation needed] To promote sales, the company partnered with CBS to have UNIVAC I predict the result of the 1952 United States presidential election live on television.
The CBS crew was so certain that UNIVAC was wrong that they believed it was not working, so they changed a certain "national trend factor" from 40% to 4% to obtain what appeared more correct 268–263, and released that for the television.
[citation needed] The first contracts were with government agencies such as the Census Bureau, the U.S. Air Force, and the U.S. Army Map Service.
[citation needed] The first sale, to the Census Bureau, was marked with a formal ceremony on March 31, 1951, at the Eckert–Mauchly Division's factory at 3747 Ridge Avenue, Philadelphia.
[citation needed] The UNIVAC I was too expensive for most universities, and Sperry Rand, unlike companies such as IBM, was not strong enough financially to afford to give many away.
[23] UNIVAC I used 6,103 vacuum tubes,[24][25] weighed 16,686 pounds (8.3 short tons; 7.6 t), consumed 125 kW,[26] and could perform about 1,905 operations per second running on a 2.25 MHz clock.
)[citation needed] Besides the operator's console, the only I/O devices connected to the UNIVAC I were up to 10 UNISERVO tape drives, a Remington Standard electric typewriter and a Tektronix oscilloscope.
It used data density 128 bits per inch (with real transfer rate 7,200 characters per second) on magnetically plated phosphor bronze tapes.
Backward and forward tape read and write operations were possible on the UNIVAC and were fully overlapped with instruction execution, permitting high system throughput in typical sort/merge data processing applications.
In practice, however, only failing components, i.e., the vacuum tubes, yielded comparison faults, as the circuit designs as such proved very reliable.
Furthermore, it took approximately 30 minutes to turn on the computer—all cathode heater power was stepped up gradually in order to reduce the in-rush current the concominant thermal stress on the tubes.
