A Brief History of Computers (Cont.)

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The First Commercial Computers (1950s)

In December 1947, Eckert and Mauchly formed Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. Because of financial difficulties, the company was acquired by Remington-Rand, now Unisys. At Remington-Rand, they built UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer), a general-purpose computer.

First delivered in June 1951, UNIVAC I sold for about $1 million and 48 systems were built. It included the following features:

• It used 5,200 vacuum tubes.


• It weighed 29,000 pounds (13 metric tons) and consumed 125 kW.


• It could perform about 1,905 operations per second running on a 2.25 MHz clock.


• The Central Complex alone (i.e. the processor and memory unit) was 4.3m×2.4m×2.6m high.


• The complete system occupied more than 35.5m² of floor space.


• Besides the operator’s console, the only I/O devices connected to it were up to 10 tape drives, an electric typewriter, and an oscilloscope.

The main memory consisted of 1,000 words of 12 characters. The 1,000 words of memory consisted of 100 channels of 10 word mercury delay line registers.