UNIVAC

The American company UNIVAC began as the "business" computer division of Remington Rand formed by the purchase of the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in 1950. (EMCC was the company founded by, and named after, the two inventors/architects of the ENIAC.) UNIVAC is an acronym, standing for UNIVersal Automatic Computer.

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John Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly built the ENIAC computer (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator) at the Moore School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Then, to reserve any future patent rights for themselves, they formed the Electronic Computer Corporation. 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. The Electronic Computer Corp. was first a subsidiary of American Totalizator, which made horse race track tote boards. However, due to managemnt changes at American Tote, ECC was sold to Remington-Rand. Rem-Rand had its own lab in Norwalk, CT, and later bought Engineering Research Associates in St. Paul, Minnesota. Remington-Rand merged these groups, calling the result the Univac Division of Remington-Rand.

American: :This page disambiguates the many uses of American. For an article about those various uses, please see Use of the word American....

Computer: A computer is a device or for processing information from data according to a program — a compiled list of instructions. The information to be processed may represent numbers, text, pictures, or sound, amongst many other types....

Remington Rand: Remington Rand was an early American computer manufacturer, best known as the original maker of the UNIVAC I, and now part of Unisys. For a time, the word "univac" was recognized as a generic synonym for "computer". Remington Rand also made office equipment....