X-Nico

3 unusual facts about Univac


Anthony Adducci

In August 1964, he accepted a position with the Sperry Rand Corporation's UNIVAC Division in St. Paul Minnesota as a system design engineer engaged in the logic design of computer peripheral equipment.

To Hare Is Human

The determined coyote then builds his latest contraption: A do-it-yourself UNIVAC Electronic Brain, which he consults for suggestions in capturing Bugs.

UNIPRINTER

The UNIPRINTER read metal UNIVAC magnetic tape using a tape reader and typed the data at 10 characters per second using a modified Remington typewriter.


24-bit

Engineering Research Associates (later merged into UNIVAC) designed a series of 24-bit drum memory machines including the Atlas, its commercial version the UNIVAC 1101, the ATHENA computer, the UNIVAC 1824 guidance computer, etc.

ARITH-MATIC

ARITH-MATIC was originally known as A-3, but was renamed by the marketing department of Remington Rand UNIVAC.

Conway Berners-Lee

He received much encouragement when Hughes and Moe at Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, predicted the effect of increasing the memory on their Univac Installation.

As space in memory and backing store was a scarce and valuable resource in those days, he had also devised a procedure for compressing text which in 1963 he sent to Bob Bemer at Univac.

Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation

Mauchly persuaded the United States Census Bureau to order an "EDVAC II" computer — a model that was soon renamed UNIVAC — receiving a contract in 1948 that called for having the machine ready for the 1950 census.

Engineering Research Associates

For a time the two companies operated as independent units within Remington, with ERA focusing on scientific and military customers, while Eckert–Mauchly's UNIVACs were sold to business customers.

Fieldata

The direct successor to the UNIVAC 1100 is the Unisys 2200 series computers, which use Fieldata to this day (although ASCII is now also common with each character encoded in 1/4 of a word, or 9 bits).

Jean E. Sammet

The meeting involved 25 engineers, programmers, marketing representatives, and salesmen who were involved with the UNIVAC, as well as representatives from users such as General Electric, Arthur Andersen, and the U.S. Census.

Leslie Hubricht

Professionally, Leslie Hubricht worked as an assistant at the Missouri Botanical Gardens from 1936 to 1943, then, until 1973, he was employed by Remington Rand as a tabulating machine mechanic and as a UNIVAC repairman.

Peter Landin

Most of his work was published during this period and the brief time he worked for Univac and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States before taking a position at Queen Mary, University of London.

PL/I

In addition to IBM, Honeywell, CDC, Data General, Digital Equipment, Prime Computer, Burroughs, RCA, and Univac served on X3J1 along with major users Eastman Kodak, MITRE, Union Carbide, Bell Laboratories, and various government and university representatives.

RIM-113

The designation XRIM-113A, indicating an experimental ship-launched interceptor missile, was allocated to the SIRCS project in May 1976, and contracts were awarded to three separate teams of contractors - RCA/Martin-Marietta, McDonnell Douglas/Sperry, and Raytheon/Lockheed/Univac - for initial studies of the SIRCS missile concept, in anticipation of a competitive evaluation.

VS/9

However, RCA had sold the patents and designs for its CCM terminal controller to Singer Corporation, so Univac developed an emulator device for the CCM which was known as the Multiterminal Connection Controller model 16, or MCC-16.


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