UNIVAC (Division of Sperry Rand)

Contribution to AI

For a while in the 1950s Americans said "univac" when they meant a computer, and one broadcast is why: on election night in 1952 the machine sitting in Philadelphia forecast an Eisenhower landslide from a small share of the early returns, and CBS, disbelieving it, held the figure back until the count confirmed it. That was the public's first sight of a machine that appeared to exercise judgement, and the association of computing with reasoning dates from it. The engineering underneath mattered longer. The 1103A of 1956 carried the first interrupt system offered to customers, worked out with engineers at NACA's Lewis laboratory who needed a batch machine to accept wind-tunnel readings as they arrived; without interrupts there is no time-sharing, no terminal, no real-time control. That machine was also, alongside IBM's 704, among the first commercial computers built around random-access core memory. Grace Hopper's programmers there produced the A-0 compiler and then FLOW-MATIC, the first data-processing language written as English-like statements, whose vocabulary passed almost directly into COBOL. By 1965 the 1108 was running batch, time-sharing and real-time work together across as many as four processors under EXEC 8. Two legacies were accidental: Seymour Cray did his last design here before leaving for Control Data, and the ENIAC patents the firm inherited were struck down in 1973, leaving the electronic computer owned by nobody.

Drafted with AI and edited by hand (claude-opus-5, reviewed 2026-08).