Word: univacs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...computerese's most useful terms when she found a moth in the machine. "From then on," she recalled, "whenever anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it." After the war, told she was too old for active duty, she went to work on UNIVAC, the first large commercial computer, and created COBOL, the breakthrough computer language that made the machines accessible to non-mathematicians. She was recalled to active duty in 1967 at age 60. Now 79 and a rear admiral, Hopper is philosophical about the Navy's early slight. "It's just as well...
Sperry managers may be another matter. The company that sold Univac, the first successful commercial computer, in the 1950s has lost much of its marketing sparkle in recent years. Entrenched bosses may be partly responsible. Says one Sperry product executive: "As a manager, there is almost nothing you can do to get fired here." Considering the new circumstances, those could be famous last words...
Those happy days soon came to an end. A month after the ENIAC's public unveiling, Eckert and Mauchly resigned rather than turn their patent rights over to the university. Five years later they developed the first commercial computer, UNIVAC 1, but business reversals forced them to sell their fledgling computer company to Remington Rand. The final insult came in 1973. Seeking to invalidate Mauchly and Eckert's patent for "the" electronic computer, Honeywell convinced a federal judge that Mauchly had based his ideas for ENIAC on the work of a computer pioneer named John Atanasoff. The patent was dismissed...
...with tardiness. IRS Commissioner Roscoe Egger acknowledged last week that his agency is taking as long as twelve weeks to send out refunds, two weeks longer than last year. The sluggishness of the IRS, said Egger, is the result of glitches in setting up a new $103 million Sperry Univac 1100/84 computer system. The IRS launched a crash program to install the computers in November to replace its creaky 1960s-era equipment...
Film and video clips also supplement many of the exhibits visitors to the museum to see, for example, amusing movies of awe-struck people faced with the first computers. One videotape shows Walter Cronkite describing how "that marvelous electronic brain," the UNIVAC, made early election predictions in the 1952 Eisenhower election...