Word: univacs
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Somewhere in the Kremlin, the Communists appear to keep a Machiavellian UNIVAC with buttons, lights and levers that can bring into operation any one of 10,000 devices of skulduggery. Press the button labeled Peace, and peace doves take off from dovecotes in every capital; pull the lever marked Hate America, and such words as "jackal" and "hyena" leap into stereotype on a hundred printing presses. The cold-war machine comes equipped with a Parliament-Persuader that brings out Communist hecklers in Rome, Paris and Tokyo, a Double-Meaning Coding Machine for use during U.N. debates, an Automatic Truce Violator...
...Remington Rand hit the electronic computer market first, with its $1,125,000 UNIVAC in 1951. cleaned up the early contracts. Today Remington Rand has 26 big UNIVACs in various models around the U.S., orders for eleven more. But spurred by President Watson, IBM now has orders for 129 giant electronic calculators; 109 of the orders are for the new 704 and 705, which are bigger and faster than the current Model 702. The big computers will cost IBM more than $1,000,000 each to build, but they will bring the company a whopping income of nearly $50 million...
...chores that formerly required scores of clerks. They could also solve incredibly complicated technical problems once beyond the scope of even the biggest staffs of engineers. Among 1954's automated strides: ¶G.E., U.S. Steel and Metropolitan Life all started using Remington Rand's $1,000,000 Univac for totting up payrolls, writing checks and figuring costs (estimated first-year savings to G.E.: $500,000). International Business Machines (whose stock rose more than 100 points during the year, to 363) was coming out with a similar machine...
...those who were indignant at the launching of the "Ten Million Americans for McCarthy" drive: This movement represents one of the prettiest compliments our nation has received since UNIVAC predicted a Democratic victory, for it is based on the assumption that we have only 10 million morons in a population of 163 million-a daintily narrow lunatic fringe that any country might be proud...
...Although UNIVAC's early predictions gave the Democrats a greater margin in the Senate than he or anyone else found reasonable as the night wore on, his basic forecast that the Democrats would control both Houses of Congress stood up. UNIVAC stuck to his guns on this, while newspaper editions and human analysts switched back and forth with every new return . . . We learn something each time, and hope that by 1956 UNIVAC's performance will be even more accurate...