Computing · 1951

UNIVAC I

The first commercial computer in the US, famous for calling an election.

Eckert and Mauchly's UNIVAC I was delivered to the US Census Bureau in 1951 and 46 were sold. On live TV in 1952 it predicted Eisenhower's landslide from a small sample of returns.

See it in the living tree Wikipedia

Arcs above join it to what it stood on, arcs below to what it led to. The bar places this stretch on the tree's whole timeline.

What it built on 2

Stored-program architecture 1945
ENIAC 1945

What it led to 2

Magnetic tape data storage 1951
A-0 compiler 1952

Related measurements

The dashed line marks when it first worked.

Fastest computer in the world Latest: 2.2×10¹⁸ operations per second (2026) Source: Wikipedia: List of fastest computers; Wikipedia: History of supercomputing

Computation per constant dollar, 1850-2006 Latest: 7.3B million units of computer power per 2006 $ (2003) Source: Nordhaus 2007, Two Centuries of Productivity Growth in Computing, J. Econ. Hist. 67(1), Table 6