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Friday, April 27, 2001 Pioneers remember 50-year-old
Univac Mammoth machine primitive precursor
to PCs By BRIAN ROSSITER Staff Writer ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ BLUE BELL -- Not in the 20 years since he retired has Bernie
Victor -- who a half-century ago had a hand in building the world's first
commercial so-called giant brain, the Univac -- so much as looked at a
computer. You might think a Victor's memory doesn't seem to malfunction when it comes to
recalling how the Univac, a multi-station system the size of a one-car
garage, started to change the way folks think, work and play. If it his recollections have faded, though, he'll get to hear
about it one more time tonight, when the Unisys retirees group during its
spring dinner and dance commemorates the delivery of the first Univac unit to
the Unisys also is planning a golden anniversary celebration,
spokesman Brian Daly said. James McGarvey of Oreland came aboard the Eckert-Mauchly
Division of Remington Rand Inc., which would later become Unisys, when the
Univac was being fine-tuned. He said that, in early 1951, he could not
envision the uses for today's computers. "Not in the slightest," he said, adding that John
Mauchly, who, ran the company with J. Presper
Eckert, wanted to build the first nonmilitary computer to predict the weather
100 years in the future. "There were probably few -- the real geniuses
-- that could have seen how computers would be today." Back then, how could McGarvey have? The Univac, all 975,000
parts of it, crawled along at 2.25 megahertz and cost about $1 million. These
days, low-end PCs stacked on Wal-Mart shelves are loaded with matchbook-size
chips zipping along at speeds 350 times faster than the Univac -- and they
cost just $650. Of course, said McGarvey, who retired in 1984, many scientists'
visions were clouded by the idea that the machine could think on its own. "We were fooled in the beginning, thinking it had a
brain," he said. "A computer just sits there until you use it. Men
and women, they make it work." When the first Univac was assembled, after more than a year of
around-the-clock work, Victor said, Census Bureau officials feared the
hulking machine would be broken if moved. So bureau staff toiled in the The bureau boasted the computer could perform calculations in
one minute that would take hired hands 67 hours. But it wasn't until the 1952
presidential election that the Univac became a household name. "After 4 (million) or 5 million votes came in, it predicted
an Eisenhower landslide, and it was right," Victor said. Building the original Univac, which now is in the Smithsonian
Institution, and several generations of computers after it was a challenge
Victor saw as akin to solving a puzzle. "When we were trying to get them to work, that was
fun," he said, noting that three large fans had to blow air on early
machines to keep them from overheating. "Then they came down the
assembly line, and one was like the other. It stopped being fun after a
while." The Univac, all 975,000 parts of it, crawled along at 2.25
megahertz and cost about $1 million.
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