Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Adlai Stevenson had led Dwight Eisenhower in polls taken before the election, but
less than an hour after the polls closed, with just 7 percent of the votes tabulated, the
UNIVAC was predicting Dwight Eisenhower would win the election in a landslide.
When CBS correspondent Charles Collingwood asked Remington Rand for the com-
puter's prediction, however, he was given the run-around. The computer's engineers
were convinced there was a programming error. For one thing, UNIVAC was predict-
ing that Eisenhower would carry several Southern states, and everybody “knew” that
Republican presidential candidates never won in the South. Remington Rand's director
of advanced research ordered the engineers to change the programming so the outcome
would be closer to what the political pundits expected. An hour later, the reprogrammed
computer predicted that Eisenhower would win by only nine electoral votes, and that's
what CBS announced. As it turns out, the computer was right and the human “experts”
were wrong. Before being reprogrammed, UNIVAC had predicted Eisenhower would
win 438 electoral votes to 93 for Stevenson. The official result was a 442-89 victory for
Eisenhower [14].
In America in the early 1950s, the word “UNIVAC” was synonymous with “com-
puter.” Remington Rand sold a total of 46 UNIVACs to government agencies, such as
the US Air Force, the US Army Map Service, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the
US Navy, as well as to large corporations and public utilities, such as General Electric,
Metropolian Life, US Steel, Du Pont, Franklin Life Insurance, Westinghouse, Pacific Mu-
tual Life Insurance, Sylvania Electric, and Consolidated Edison.
Office automation leader IBM did not enter the commercial computer market until
1953, and its initial products were inferior to the UNIVAC. However, IBM quickly
turned the tables on Remington Rand, thanks to a larger base of existing customers, a far
superior sales and marketing organization, and a much greater investment in research
and development. In 1955 IBM held more than half the market, and by the mid-1960s
IBM dominated the computer industry with 65 percent of total sales, compared to
12 percent for number two computer maker Sperry Rand (the successor to Remington
Rand) [14].
In the earliest digital computers, every instruction was coded as a long string of 0s and
1s. People immediately began looking for ways to make coding faster and less error-
prone. One early improvement was the creation of assembly language, which allowed
programmers to work with symbolic representations of the instruction codes. Still, one
assembly language instruction was required for every machine instruction. Program-
mers wanted fewer, higher-level instructions to generate more machine instructions. In
1951 Frances Holberton, one of the six original ENIAC programmers, created a sort-
merge generator for the UNIVAC that took a specification of files to be manipulated and
automatically produced the machine program to do the sorting and merging. Building
on this work, Grace Murray Hopper, also at Remington Rand, developed the A-0 sys-
tem that automated the process of linking together subroutines to form the complete
machine code [15].
