Univac beats the pundits !

[Lantern]

I was reading this pieceabout Nate Silver which began with this nugget.

It wasn’t just the first coast-to-coast broadcast of a presidential election, and Walter Cronkite’s first time anchoring on election night; 1952 marked the first time a computer was used to project the winner.

Laughable now, groundbreaking then.

"Univac, can you tell us a prediction now? I think that Univac is probably an honest machine . . . "

But Univac did have something to say. With not even 3 1/2 million votes counted, “he” predicted 100 to 1 odds of an Eisenhower victory, in a landslide so huge it seemed impossible, given what was then thought to be a close race. The results were withheld for several hours, fearing humiliation. But Univac was right.

The war between the stat heads and the pundits had begun.

After a bit of searching on Youtube I was able to find this segmentabout the incident.

A piece of history right at the intersection of politics, television and computing. As the documentary suggests this was the moment when computers entered the public consciousness. And TV itself was pretty new, I think this was the first presidential election covered live by the networks.

[running_coach]

Franchise by Isaac Asimov

In the future, the United States has converted to an “electronic democracy” where the computer Multivac selects a single person to answer a number of questions. Multivac will then use the answers and other data to determine what the results of an election would be, avoiding the need for an actual election to be held.

The idea of a computer predicting whom the electorate would vote for instead of actually holding an election was probably inspired by the UNIVAC I’s correct prediction of the result of the 1952 election.

[Measure_for_Measure]

Wikipedia, emphasis added: Major physical features

UNIVAC I used 5,200 vacuum tubes,[6] weighed 29,000 pounds (13 metric tons), consumed 125 kW, and 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 4.3 m by 2.4 m by 2.6 m high. The complete system occupied more than 35.5 m² of floor space.

Main memory details

The main memory consisted of 1000 words of 12 characters. When representing numbers, they were written as 11 decimal digits plus sign. Univac apparently worked with FORTRAN. I wonder whether the original programs are stored anywhere.

[Lantern]

A good NPR storyon Univac. Apparently that console in 1952 was a mock-up:

The “face” Collingwood refered to was just the console. He sat in front of a mock-up of the console in New York. It was the size of a large desk, with something that looked like a blinking bookcase sitting on top. The real UNIVAC, which took up the better part of a room, was nearly 100 miles away in Philadelphia with its programmers and a CBS camera crew.

[dropzone]

@Measure_for_Measure

Univac apparently worked with FORTRAN.

Nope, FORTRAN didn’t come along until 1957. UNIVAC I was programmed in the manly style, with raw machine code.

[Lantern]

Yeah a little bit later the documentary talks about how difficult and tedious it was to code on those early machines and how programming languages like Fortran made it easier.

[Derleth]

@dropzone

Nope, FORTRAN didn’t come along until 1957. UNIVAC I was programmed in the manly style, with raw machine code.

To be more precise, the earliest computers* were programmed in assembly language which was translated by hand into machine code. By the time the UNIVAC I came around, they might have decided to have the machine turn the assembly language into machine code, but 1952 was still pretty early.

(Apparently, Nathaniel Rochester wrote the first assembler for the IBM 701 in 1954, a good two years after this. So, yeah, assembly code translated by hand into machine code. More tedious than difficult.)

*(Depending on how you define the term and if any of you say anything more on this specific topic I swear I will hunt you down and force you to eat a UNIVAC.)

[dropzone]

How about Miss UNIVAC 1957?

Crippled for prudery:

http:/ /mocholand.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/pat-sheehan.jpg