Happy Birthday, UNIVAC I

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."

Re:UNIVAC sounds great and all...

Who cares if it runs Linux ... as long as I can mod the case!

That would make a great story...

3 years ago.

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

Re:That would make a great story...

Exactly... there are a lot of old computers out there and a 53rd birthday is nothing special (nor, really, is a 50th birthday, but we do attach meaning to that)
I'm totally with you man. However, I will be looking forward to it's 0x37 bday on 0xE067D6.

Re:That would make a great story...

Well, maybe, but 53 is a larger number than 50... plus, it's a prime number... :-)

Re:That would make a great story...

As long as we're recognizing birthdays at arbitrary years, we should do it in true /. fashion...in powers of 2. Let's see something when the 64th birthday rolls around.

Re:That would make a great story...

Each number has its own unique contribution to make, and 53 is certainly not a lesser number than 50.

I've got a 53 dollar bill right here saying you're wrong.

Oh wait, actually I don't.

where is it now?

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?

The original UNIVAC is now on display in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington

Re:where is it now?

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?

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?

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.

Re:where is it now?

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?

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

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.

Re:where is it now?

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

Yes, but what is the range of those numbers?

Re:1000 numbers

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

Re:1000 numbers

The original manual can be found at bitsavers.org [bitsavers.org].

Well,

Was it so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe could afford it?

And yet

after all these years, it STILL doesn't have decent 3D hardware support video drivers! Bastards!

I remember UNIVAC I

I wrote about this [slashdot.org] back on the 50th anniversary.

I started my career on Univac / Unisys

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!

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

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

from the venerable old-computers.com [old-computers.com]

I'll tell you what's been added!

Just last month they had the crew from "This Old House" over to do a case mod for it.

UNIVAC = Johnny-come-lately

...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.

Has anyone tried...

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.

Univac was called "Univac"

because it had just one Vacuum Tube. That's why Asimov [asimovonline.com] had to develop Multivac.

A time when anything was possible

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.

Re:A time when anything was possible

Funny - I asked the Asimov question [google.com] to the contemporary equivalent [google.com] of the Asimov omniscient machine and got the same answer as people in this short story. Obviously because it was pointing to web sites about the short story itself, but...

Not the first business computer

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.

Edmund C. Berkeley

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.

Seems like a little....

[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]

Re:What no "Imagine a Beowolf cluster" jokes yet?

Nope, it's not the AC's day off. It's just that the UNIVAC I is the only computer that nobody can (even trying their hardest) actually imagine "a Beowulf cluster" of.

Where would you put it? "Oh and over here, next to Texas is New Mexico which, you might find interesting to note is not actually an inhabited state. It's where we keep our UNIVAC Beowulf Cluster. Sweet huh? You can see it from space!"

I hate to have paid for this story

I would feel like a real schmuck if I had paid to view this story from the mysterious future.

First Virus?

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]

Obligatory Simpsons quote (Professor Frink)

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.

Where's Ken Brown?

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.

Blast from the Past

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.

Decendant of Univac I still in production

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!

Re:53rd birthday? what's special about it?

I think computers only care about special binary birthdays.
"I'm 110101 years old? So what? I'm looking forward to my 1000000 birthday party! That'll be the day! And don't even get me started about the day I turn 10000000!!!!"

Re:53rd birthday? what's special about it?

Fun with 53
53 is prime (fun)
5+3 is 8 (not prime, but a power of 2. and we all love powers of 2)
a google search for 53 returns 96,100,000 results and 9+6+1 = 16 (a power of 2!) and 1+6 is 7 (a prime!)
5-3 is 2 (a power of 2, and a prime ... too wild)

And you thought 53 wasn't special :)