What Is Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC)?

So what does "universal" mean? Well, it all depends on who you ask; it means you can program different programs for it—like one for math, one for business data processing, and one for games! To others, it means that it can do anything like find out who killed JFK, calculate pi to 100 digits, solve world hunger, or something like that. But if we're being honest here, I think we all know what "universal" really means: whatever you want it to mean. The UNIVAC was a computer that made a lot of waves in the 1950s. It was the first commercial computer and the first to use magnetic tape for storage. It was also among the first computers to use magnetic core memory. UNIVAC was the first computer to use all-transistor circuitry, and it made history by being the first commercial computer to sell over one million units. NASA also used the machine to predict weather patterns and the U.S. Census Bureau for data tabulation. UNIVAC was invented by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, who were employees at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the time. They developed the machine alongside a team of engineers working on ENIAC (another computer invented simultaneously). The UNIVAC was designed to be more potent than ENIAC, which made it capable of performing calculations faster than ever before—about 100 times faster, according to some accounts! But despite being technologically inferior to newer computers, UNIVAC represents a significant leap forward in computing history: It introduced a new way of thinking. What if I told you that a computer was released in 1952 that could do all those things? What if I also said that this computer was pretty famous for about a decade before it became obsolete?