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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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