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Univac

1951 - It was the first commercial general-use computer. The UNIVAC I was unveiled in Washington DC. It was developed for the US census bureau. It stood 8 foot high and used magnetic tape at 10,000 characters a second.

UNIVAC is an acronym for the Universal Automatic Computer. The computer itself was delivered to the United States Census Bureau on March 31st, 1951. UNIVAC I was also used to predict the result of the 1952 Presidential election.

UNIVAC I cost around 1.2 million to build, which was a lot larger than their estimated price of $159,000. 46 units were built and delivered. 5,200 vacuum tubes were used to run UNIVAC I. It performed 1,905 operations per second.

Want more info on UNIVAC? Check out A Few Good Men From Univac (History of Computing) on Amazon

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for June 14

• 1938 - The First Superman comic
• 1985 - Apple lays off 1,200 employees
• 1997 - Tamapittchi, a cellular phone with a Tamagotchi built into it, is released in Japan
• 2006 - Google Maps for Enterprise
• 2009 - #CNNFail

Tagged as: apple, cnn, day in tech history, Geek, geek history, Google, google maps, history, japan, Podcast, superman, Tamagotchi, technology history, United States, united states census bureau, univac, UNIVAC I, washington DC

Article by Jeffrey Powers @geekazine

Jeffrey has written 380 awesome articles for us at Day in Tech History