Goto

Collaborating Authors

 univac


The Story Behind America's First Commercial Computer

TIME - Tech

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.


AI in the News

AI Magazine

The computer The articles collected for this special 82-85. "Lexington is the home of Massachusetts Bolitho and Dr. Martin Klein, who set a superintelligent electronic'brain' collage in 1956. Please note that: (1) an the machine to music, emphasized that which reduces to a bare minimum the human excerpt may not reflect the overall tenor of their accomplishment was'an experiment element in the complex problem of the article, nor contain all of the relevant of mathematical importance only.' It is tracking and destroying an attacking airplane. Science News more popularly known -- can sight the approach - Jon Glick, Webmaster, AI TOPICS Letter. "A gambling of an attacker, compute its course, As is now well known, in operation at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, kill.