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UNIVAC serves as the catch-all name for the American manufacturers of the lines of mainframe computers by that name, which through mergers and acquisitions underwent numerous name changes. more...

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The company UNIVAC began as the business computer division of Remington Rand formed by the 1950 purchase of the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, founded four years earlier by ENIAC inventors J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly.

Corporate history and structure

Eckert and Mauchly built the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering between 1943 and 1946. A March 1946 patent rights dispute with the university led Eckert and Mauchly to depart the Moore School to form the Electronic Control Company, later renamed Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC), based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. That company first built a computer called BINAC (BInary Automatic Computer) for Northrop Aviation (which was little used, or perhaps not at all). Afterwards began the development of UNIVAC. UNIVAC was first intended for the Bureau of the Census, which paid for much of the development, and then was put in production.

With the death of EMCC's chairman and chief financial backer Henry Strauss in a plane crash on October 25, 1949, EMCC was sold to typewriter maker Remington Rand on February 15, 1950. (Eckert and Mauchly now reported to Leslie Groves, the retired army general who had headed up the Manhattan Project.) Remington Rand had its own lab in Norwalk, Connecticut, and later bought Engineering Research Associates in St. Paul, Minnesota. Remington Rand merged these groups, calling the result the Univac Division of Remington Rand.

The most famous UNIVAC product was the UNIVAC I mainframe computer of 1951, which became known for predicting the outcome of the U.S. presidential election the following year.

In 1953 or 1954 Remington Rand merged their tabulating machine division in Norwalk, Connecticut, the Engineering Research Associates "scientific" computer division, and the UNIVAC "business" computer division into a single division under the UNIVAC name.

In 1955 Remington Rand merged with Sperry Corporation to become Sperry Rand. The UNIVAC division of Remington Rand was renamed the Univac division of Sperry Rand. General Douglas MacArthur was chosen to head the company. Around 1975, to assist "corporate identity" the name was changed to Sperry Univac, along with "Sperry Remington", "Sperry New Holland" etc.

In the 1960s, UNIVAC was one of the eight major computer companies in an industry then referred to as "Snow White and the seven dwarfs"—IBM, the largest, being Snow White and the others being the dwarfs: Burroughs, NCR, Control Data Corporation, General Electric, RCA and Honeywell. (Another industry player, albeit much smaller, was Scientific Data Systems). In the 1970s, after GE sold its computer business to Honywell and RCA sold its to Univac, the analogy to the seven dwarfs of legend became less apt and the remaining small firms became known as the "BUNCH" (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, and Honeywell).

Read more at Wikipedia.org