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UNIVAC Full Form

UNIVAC Full Form

Edited By Team Careers360 | Updated on Jun 27, 2023 03:48 PM IST

UNIVAC stands for Universal Automatic Computer. It is one of the first commercial computers produced. It was founded on the same ideas but utilized vacuum tubes rather than transistors for computation. Also, instead of a keyboard and disc drives, it was built to operate with punched cards for input and output. BASIC (Beginners All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), FORTRAN (Formula Translation) and COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) were among the earliest computer programming languages used on this machine.

History

John Presper Ecker and John Mauchly worked on the engineering design of the ENIAC computer for the United States during World War II after leaving the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Despite Remington Rand, Inc. acquiring their firm, patents, and expertise in 1950, the partners delivered the first UNIVAC to the U.S. Bureau of the Census in March 1951. UNIVAC was created from the ground up as a stored-program computer, therefore it was significantly different architecturally even though it owed partly to ENIAC expertise. It employed magnetic tape for all other input and output and an operator keyboard and console typewriter for basic or restricted input. A different tape printer was used to print the output after it had been captured on tape. The punched card accounting devices of the day were supposed to be replaced by the commercial data processing computer known as UNIVAC I. It was a real business computer that represented the coming together of academic computing research and the late 19th and early 20th-century movement toward office automation. As a result, it marked the beginning of the “ Big Iron” period, which saw the production of massive computer devices.

Importance Of UNIVAC

The most crucial hardware was created between the 1940s and 1950s, UNIVAC. It helped the manufacturers to develop smaller and more affordable computers, enlarging the market for computer hardware. This helped in making computers accessible to the private sector. It turned out to be a very useful business machine as well as a research tool for computer scientists at universities. The Philadelphia Inquirer used it as one of its earliest business applications to forecast election results.

Significance Of UNIVAC

A major improvement in the field of interaction with computers was made by UNIVAC and other powerful machines like IBM 701. Also, computer scientists were able to significantly enhance the design of computer hardware by analyzing how users interacted with UNIVAC and other big computers. These turned out to be highly advantageous to not only UNIVAC but also to all of its offspring. It is crucial to comprehend the nature of the scientific study that was carried out using UNIVAC because it had a significant impact on the design of future computers.

Functions Of UNIVAC

UNIVAC can be used to perform the following functions:

  • UNIVAC was used to punch card input and output. It was an electronic digital computing principle-based device which used transistors in the place of vacuum tubes.
  • UNIVAC I was designed to be a mainframe computer for corporate usage that could offer distributed computation capabilities to several users at once.
  • The UNIVAC II and III were the first commercial computers to use magnetic tape for primary memory, whereas the UNIVAC I was the first computer to use magnetic tape for secondary memory.
  • UNIVAC II was built in 1954 and was able to hold 1.75 million words of data on 58 magnetic cassettes. It also replaced UNIVAC I.

Mode Of Operation

It is designed in such a way that through tape control, the UNIVAC computer receives instruction every 1/60 second. Also, it can get guidance from a drum memory card. Standard cards, which have the proper software punched onto them, are used to operate UNIVAC. On the card punch, a group of 80 words known as the “sequential function table” stores the operation sequence or the order in which the computer performs its basic operation. With a word length of 24 bits, UNIVAC performs efficient arithmetic, logical, and input-output operations and can handle integers up to 20 digits. A computer can store a maximum of 2048 words at a speed of around 2500 operations per second.

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