The Story Behind America's First Commercial Computer

When UNIVAC--the Universal Automatic Computer--was dedicated a few months later, the New York Times called the machine "an eight-foot-tall mathematical genius" that could in one-sixth of a second "classify an average citizen as to sex marital status, education, residence, age group, birthplace, employment, income and a dozen other classifications." Until then the Bureau's data had been handled with help from an electric counting machine first developed for the 1890 census. Advances in computer technology during the Second World War made for faster processing speeds--a development of particular interest to the Census Bureau, given the volume of data associated with regularly counting the U.S. population. During the war they had designed ENIAC, a large-scale general purpose computer, at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1946 the pair left the university to start a commercial venture and secured a contract with the National Bureau of Standards to study what would be required for a computer for the Bureau of the Census.