What was the first commercial computer - the UNIVAC I?

Imagine a computer that weighs as much as three giant elephants and takes up an entire room! Join Mira and Finn as they travel back to 1951 to meet the UNIVAC I, the world’s first commercial computer. This isn't like the tiny phone in your pocket; this machine is a 16,000-pound beast filled with 5,000 glowing glass vacuum tubes! It was originally built to help the US Census Bureau count millions of people, but it became a superstar on live television! In 1952, this humongous machine did something impossible: it correctly predicted the winner of the presidential election before the votes were even finished being counted. Everyone was shocked! How did we go from these giant, humming metal boxes to the sleek tablets we use today? Find out how the UNIVAC I started the digital revolution and changed the world forever. It’s a story of big math, blinking lights, and the very first steps toward the future!

Transcript

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Welcome to History's Not Boring by kidopoly.com. I'm Mira. And I'm Finn. Mira, why are we standing in front of this giant humming metal box? Because Finn, this isn't just a box. Around this time, exactly 75 years ago, the world changed forever when this monster was unveiled. It looks like a giant refrigerator for a dinosaur. How big is it? It's called the Univac 1, and it weighs 16,000 pounds. That is the weight of one full-grown male African elephant. No way! My tablet weighs like nothing! You're saying this computer is as heavy as an elephant? Exactly. It was the first commercial computer ever built in the United States, and it filled up an entire room. A whole room? How many iPads could you fit in a room that size? Thousands! It was 25 feet long and 50 feet wide. That's about the size of a small house. But why? My phone can play games and watch videos. What did this giant elephant machine actually do? In 1951, computers weren't for games. They were for massive math problems that would take humans years to solve. Years of math? That sounds like the worst homework assignment ever. The US Census Bureau felt the same way. They had to count 150 million Americans, and they needed help fast. Wait, 150 million people? How did they count them before the giant elephant computer? By hand, Finn! Thousands of people with pens and paper. It took almost 10 years to finish the count from 1940. 10 years? By the time they finished, weren't there a bunch of new people to count? Precisely! That's why two brilliant guys named Jay Presper Eckert and John Mackley decided to build a better brain. Eckert and Mackley? Where did they build this thing? In a giant garage. They started their own company in Philadelphia. But building a 16,000 pound computer wasn't cheap. How much did it cost? A hundred dollars? A thousand? Try one million dollars! In today's money, that would be over twelve million dollars for just one machine. 12 million dollars for a box that can't even play Minecraft? That's crazy! It didn't have a screen fin. No mouse, no keyboard, and definitely no graphics. Then how did you talk to it? Did you have to scream at the metal? They used something called magnetic tape. It looked like long ribbons of metal that stored the information. Like the tapes in an old VCR, but made of metal. Exactly. One reel of tape could hold about one million characters. To the people in 1951, that was like magic. Magic that weighs eight tonnes. Mira, what was inside that giant box making all that noise? Inside the Univac 1 were 5,000 vacuum tubes. They looked like giant glowing light bulbs. Five thousand light bulbs? It must have been super bright in there. It was bright and incredibly hot. Those tubes produced so much heat that the computer needed massive cooling fans. Like a giant hairdry. I bet it sounded like a jet engine. It was loud. And if even one of those 5,000 tubes burned out, the whole computer would stop working. So they had to check 5,000 bulbs every time it broke? That would take forever. They did. But wait until you hear about the memory. It didn't use silicon chips like we have today. What did it use? Brains in a jar? Not brains, but mercury. They used tanks of liquid metal called mercury delay lines to store data. Ew, liquid metal! That sounds like something from a sci-fi movie. Isn't mercury poisonous? It is. They had to seal it in seven foot-long tubes. Sound waves would bounce through the liquid metal to hold the information. So the computer was a giant, loud, hotbox full of glowing bulbs and poisonous liquid metal. Pretty much. But it could do 1,905 operations per second. People thought it was a miracle. 1,900 operations? That sounds like a lot. Is it? Compared to a person with a pencil, yes. But your smartphone is billions of times faster than that today. Billions! Take that, elephant computer. But Mirror, did it actually help the Centres Bureau? It did! But its most famous moment happened on live TV on the night of November 4th, 1952. Haha, no, it was the presidential election. Everyone was watching to see who would win. Dwight D. Eisenhower or Adlai Stevenson. Did they have the computer count the votes? How did a room-sized box get on TV? CBS News brought in a UNIVAC to predict the winner. At 8:30 pm, when only a few votes were in, the computer made a guess. Only a few votes? That's like guessing the end of a movie after the first two minutes. The computer predicted Eisenhower would win in a landslide with 442 electoral votes. Did the humans believe it? I bet they thought the machine was broken. They didn't. The human experts thought it would be a very close race. They were so scared the computer was wrong that they changed its code. They cheated. They messed with the elephant brain. They did. They made the computer give a safer answer. But then, as the real votes came in, something shocking happened. What happened? Did it explode? No. It turned out the computer's first guess was almost perfect. Eisenhower won 442 votes, just like Univac said. Whoa! The machine was smarter than the experts. People must have been terrified. They were! The news anchor, Walter Cronkite, had to admit on air that the machine had beaten them all. Did everyone run out and buy an elephant computer the next day? Not exactly. Only 46 Univac 1 computers were ever built. They were just too big and too expensive for regular people. Yeah, I don't think an African elephant-sized computer would fit in my bedroom anyway. But it proved that computers could do more than just math. They could predict the future and handle huge amounts of data. So, from 46 giant boxes, how did we get to billions of tiny phones? Scientists invented the transistor to replace those hot vacuum tubes. It made things smaller, faster, and much cooler. Good. Because I don't want 5,000 light bulbs and a tank of poisonous mercury in my pocket. Me neither. Did you know the Univac 1 was so big it had to be shipped in pieces and put together like a giant Lego set? Imagine losing the instructions for a 16,000 pound Lego set. That would be a nightmare. It really would be. It's incredible to think that in just 75 years we went from a room-sized elephant to a tiny chip. It really is. Alright, Finn, time for the quiz! Are you ready to test your giant computer knowledge? I'm ready. I've got all 16,000 pounds of facts stored in my brain. First question. Around this time, how many years ago was the Univac 1 first unveiled? Next one. To the nearest thousand, how many pounds did the Univac 1 weigh? Question 3. Instead of microchips, the Univac are used 5,000 of these glowing objects to think. What were they? Here's number four. Which US president did the computer correctly predict would win the 1952 election? Last question. What poisonous liquid metal was used in the computer's memory tanks? Great job! Let's see how you did with the answers. The first answer is, it was unveiled around this time, 75 years ago, in 1951. For question two, it weighed 16,000 pounds, which is the weight of one large male African elephant. Number three, the answer is it used vacuum tubes, which looked like big light bulbs. Question 4. The computer correctly predicted a landslide win for Dwight D. Eisenhower. And the final answer is it used mercury to store its memory. I still can't believe they had to use liquid metal. That is definitely the grossest computer fact I've ever heard. Well, it worked, and without the Univac 1, we might not have the cool gadgets we use every day. I'm glad we have the small ones now. Can you imagine trying to fit an elephant in your backpack for school? Definitely not. If you loved learning about the giant computer that shocked the world, please give us a five-star review. Yeah, it helps more people find the show. Just scroll down on your app and tap those stars. It's way easier than fixing a vacuum tube. And don't forget to visit our site, kidopoly.com. We have so many awesome games and activities there to help you learn even more. If you want a shout out or have a cool history topic for us, email us at hello at kidopoly.com. We love hearing from you guys. Thanks for listening to History is not boring. I'm Mira. And I'm Finn. See you next time.