Word: univacs
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Many nights after most employees had gone home, the main computer at Sperry Univac's office near Philadelphia continued to hum. Two programming supervisors, David E. Kelly and Matthew Palmer Jr., had taught the machine to store and print complicated arrangements for musical groups, which the two then peddled to stores and bands. In the course of three years, the entrepreneurs bilked Sperry Univac out of some $144,000 in computer time. And they might never have been caught if another employee had not informed on them...
...possess a modern computerized check-processing and accounting system. Stores do not use computers for charge accounts, since Soviet citizens are not permitted this capitalist excess, and they have not computerized other parts of their operations, like inventory control. Aeroflot, the Soviet national airline, in 1975 bought two Univac 1106 computers, worth about $5 million apiece, from the U.S.'s Sperry Univac to automate reservations on international flights; but the world's largest airline has not yet computerized its domestic reservation system...
...leading U .S. authorities on the present state of Soviet computers is Dr. Carl Hammer, director of computer sciences at Sperry Univac. Hammer, who often visits Russian cybernetic installations, believes the U.S.S.R. is nearly equal to the U.S. in the design and construction of computers. But it lags so badly in performance because of the Soviet failure so far to master "chip" technology-the ability to place large numbers of miniature circuits on tiny (usually ½ sq. in.) silicon chips or plates. While U.S. engineers can cram 10,000 to 50,000 components on one of these chips, the Russians...
Although the pilot systems now in operation are made by several companies (among them: IBM, National Cash Register Co., Sperry Univac) and have varying capabilities, they all flash each purchase on a screen mounted at the check-out counter and produce a tape listing each item by product and price at the end of the sale. The computers keep track of which items are subject to sales taxes, to cents-off promotions, to Sunday sales bans and even to Food and Drug Administration health warnings...
Heinz Nixdorf, 47, has built Germany's most successful computer manufacturing company. The firm, Nixdorf-Computer, of which he is founder, sole owner and chief executive, has been competing head to head with IBM, Machines Bull (now Honeywell), Philips, Burroughs and Univac. Nixdorfs firm is the only European-based company that has consistently earned a profit from computers throughout the past two decades. Lately, the directors of one major manufacturer decided that he must be doing something right: AEG-Telefunken last December placed its computer interests in a fifty-fifty partnership with Nixdorf; the two companies have formed...