Word: univac
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...point in the gargantuan task of sorting and examining 100 million tax reports. Ordinarily the agency, long hailed by intimidated taxpayers as a model of efficiency, is unfazed by the awesome bureaucratic burden. This year, however, an astonishing array of glitches in the IRS's new $131 million Sperry-Univac computers has created an unprecedented backlog of unprocessed tax forms...
...Anyone who watched Carson, studied him, as we all did, for decades, saw two things: the Univac brain, riffling through the comic possibilities as he listened to his guest, and an instant later ejected the perfect bon mot; and his distance from the action, as if he were watching the show and himself from some Olympian aerie, where it was always cool. Tynan writes of Carson appraising the other guests at a party, "his eyes twinkling like icicles." It was what we know, from Carson's avatar Letterman, as Midwestern cool: ingratiating but withholding...
...fine art, weighing his bats on a postal scale, massaging them with olive oil and resin. When he said, "Hitting is 50% above the shoulders," he was speaking of a sharp eye--to read the seams on a curve ball and then smack the cover off it--and a UNIVAC brain that held all relevant data on a rival pitcher's quirks...
...Mauchly and Eckert create UNIVAC, the first commercial computer; a year later, it successfully predicts a landslide for Eisenhower...
...entirely forgotten. In the late 1960s, Sperry Rand, which held the rights to Eckert and Mauchly's original UNIVAC patents, sued Honeywell (which, like IBM, had got into the computer business) for royalty payments. At one point in the six-year litigation, Atanasoff testified that Mauchly cribbed ABC's key features during a five-day visit in 1941. Mauchly indignantly denied the accusation. But the judge took a different view. In a 1973 decision that was never appealed, he invalidated Eckert and Mauchly's patents and in effect declared Atanasoff the winner. Historians, however, interpret the ruling more broadly, viewing...