J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly built the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering between 1943 and 1946.

A 1946 patent rights dispute with the university led Eckert and Mauchly to depart the Moore School to form the Electronic Control Company, later renamed Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC), based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

With the death of EMCC's chairman and chief financial backer Henry L. Straus in a plane crash on October 25, 1949, EMCC was sold to typewriter, office machine, electric razor, and gun maker Remington Rand on February 15, 1950.

Eckert and Mauchly now reported to Leslie Groves[citation needed], the retired army general who had previously managed building The Pentagon and led the Manhattan Project.

The most famous UNIVAC product was the UNIVAC I mainframe computer of 1951, which became known for predicting the outcome of the U.S. presidential election the following year: this incident is noteworthy because the computer correctly predicted an Eisenhower landslide over Adlai Stevenson, whereas the final Gallup poll had Eisenhower winning the popular vote 51–49 in a close contest.

Colonel Wade Heavey explained to the Senate subcommittee that the national mobilization planning involved multiple industries and agencies: "This is a tremendous calculating process...there are equations that can not be solved by hand or by electrically operated computing machines because they involve millions of relationships that would take a lifetime to figure out."

Heavey told the subcommittee it was needed to help with mobilization and other issues similar to the invasion of Normandy that were based on the relationships of various groups.

[4] The UNIVAC was manufactured at Remington Rand's former Eckert-Mauchly Division plant on W Allegheny Avenue in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

General Douglas MacArthur, then the chairman of the Board of Directors of Remington Rand, was chosen to continue in that role in the new company.

There was a some degree of internal organisation turmoil from the period of the creation of Sperry Rand in 1955 right into the early 1960s.

This culminated in the resignation of William Norris in 1957[9] and would continue until the early 1960s with the decentralisation of the former Remington Group and the promotion of UNIVAC to a full division of Sperry Rand.

In 1978, Sperry Rand, a conglomerate of various divisions (computers, typewriters, office furniture, hay balers, manure spreaders, gyroscopes, avionics, radar, electric razors), decided to concentrate solely on its computing interests and all of the unrelated divisions were sold.

As of 2021[update], Unisys continues to design and manufacture enterprise class computers with the ClearPath server lines.

The UNIVAC Solid State was a 2-address, decimal computer, with memory on a rotating drum with 5,000 signed 10-digit words, aimed at the general-purpose business market.

The magnetic gates required drive pulses of current produced by a transmitter-type vacuum tube, of a type still used in amateur radio final amplifiers.

It was a one-address machine with 30-bit instructions, had a 4K operating system and was programmed in the PAL assembly language.

A design for an "Emulator" board was available that would allow the plugboard 1004 to run programs read from card decks.

Additional peripherals were also available including a paper tape reader and a three pocket stacker selectable card read/punch.

[citation needed] The Commercial Systems version had a three pass assembler and a program generator.

Delivery of the 1107 was late and this affected sales; the subsequent 1108 was considerably more successful, and helped to establish the series as viable competitors to the IBM System/360.

Since the 9000 series was intended as direct competitors to IBM, they used 80-column cards and EBCDIC character encoding.

Memory capacity started as low as 8K byte primary storage for a batch-configured system.

EXEC 8 allowed simultaneous handling of real-time applications, time-sharing, and background batch work.