June 14, 1951: UNIVAC I is dedicated
On June 14, 1951, Census Bureau officials attended the dedication of UNIVAC I at the Eckert-Mauchly Laboratory in Philadelphia. It was the first major commercial electronic computer built in the United States.
The Census Bureau had an obvious use for it. The agency processed millions of records, sorted huge volumes of population data, and turned paper forms into national statistics. That work ran on mechanical tabulating equipment, slowly and with heavy manual labor.
UNIVAC used vacuum tubes, magnetic tape, and mercury delay-line memory. It weighed around 16,000 pounds, filled a room, and cost about $1.25 million. It processed records faster, more consistently, and at far larger scale than the older tabulating systems.
June 14 was the dedication, not the day the work started. The Census Bureau owned the machine, but Eckert-Mauchly kept it in Philadelphia for demonstrations and did not install it at the government offices for another 21 months. It went on to tabulate part of the 1950 census and the entire 1954 economic census.
UNIVAC moved computing out of military and scientific labs and into government and business. This was the early shape of enterprise computing: payroll, insurance, banking, logistics, public records, and forecasting.
During the 1952 presidential election, CBS used a UNIVAC to predict the result. With about 3 million votes counted, the machine called an Eisenhower landslide at 100 to 1 odds. Polls had pointed to a close race, so the programmers and CBS doubted it and held the prediction back. They fed in revised numbers that produced a softer call for the broadcast.
UNIVAC was right. The final result was 442 to 89, less than 1 percent off.
After 1952, people saw computers differently. One had read the early returns and gotten the result right while the studio hesitated. UNIVAC helped prove these machines belonged at work, as infrastructure and not novelty.