From: Mustafa Akgul (akgul@Bilkent.EDU.TR)
Date: Fri 29 Oct 2004 - 11:02:38 EEST
>From admin@edu-cyberpg.com Thu Oct 28 14:58:35 2004
Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 10:37:05 -0400
From: Educational CyberPlayGround <admin@edu-cyberpg.com>
Subject: In '52, huge computer called Univac changed election night
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From: "Maney, Kevin"
Date: October 27, 2004 2:44:06 PM EDT
Kevin Maney www.kevinmaney.com
In '52, huge computer called Univac changed election night
http://tinyurl.com/5qk8f
There was another election season, back in 1952, when a presidential
contest seemed too close to call, America worried it was vulnerable to
attack, and a single company dominated computing.
Those circumstances set the stage for the election night dramatics of
the Univac - perhaps the most significant live TV performance ever by a
computer. It might just be technology's equivalent of the first Elvis
appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Except parents didn't worry that
computers were going to destroy the moral fiber of the nation's youth,
which shows you how much parents know.
In a few hours on Nov. 4, 1952, Univac altered politics, changed the
world's perception of computers and upended the tech industry's status
quo. Along the way, it embarrassed CBS long before Dan Rather could do
that all by himself.
The Republican candidate was Dwight Eisenhower. The Democrat, Adlai
Stevenson. Polls showed them in a dead heat.
Their most pressing issue: an epic global struggle between democracy and
communism. The Korean War had begun two years before. Joseph McCarthy's
Red Scare was in full swing, aimed at alleged communists. Several
nations were testing nuclear bombs. In Denmark, George "Christine"
Jorgensen had the first sex-change operation.
No telling which of those most horrified Americans.
Computers were the stuff of science fiction and wide-eyed articles about
"electric brains." Few people had actually seen one. Only a handful had
been built, among them the first computer, Eniac, created by J. Presper
Eckert and John Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1940s.
By 1952, Eckert and Mauchly had joined Remington Rand and finished
another computer, which they called Univac. They had only that one.
IBM was racing to build its Univac-beater, dubbed the 701. For 30 years,
going back to mechanical punch-card machines, IBM had lorded over
computing to a degree Microsoft can only dream about. The 701 was due to
be unveiled in January 1953. IBM CEO Thomas Watson planned a public
relations bacchanal.
In summer 1952, a Remington Rand executive approached CBS News chief Sig
Mickelson and said the Univac might be able to plot early election-night
returns against past voting patterns and spit out a predicted winner.
Mickelson and anchor Walter Cronkite thought the claim was a load of
baloney but figured it would at least be entertaining to try it on the
air.
Eckert and Mauchly sought help from a University of Pennsylvania
statistician, Max Woodbury. He and Mauchly wrote one of the first
algorithms for computing, working at Mauchly's house because Mauchly had
been blacklisted as pro-communist. "John wasn't allowed into the company
anymore," says Mauchly's widow, Kay Mauchly Antonelli.
On election night, the 16,000-pound Univac remained at its home in
Philadelphia. In the TV studio, CBS set up a fake computer - a panel
embedded with blinking Christmas lights and a teletype machine. Cronkite
sat next to it. Correspondent Charles Collingwood and a camera crew set
up in front of the real Univac.
As polls began to close, clerks typed the data into the Univac using
three Unityper machines, which punched holes in a paper tape that would
be fed into the computer.
By 8:30 p.m. ET - long before news organizations of the era knew
national election outcomes - Univac spit out a startling prediction. It
said Eisenhower would get 438 electoral votes to Stevenson's 93 - a
landslide victory. Because every poll had said the race would be tight,
CBS didn't believe the computer and refused to air the prediction.
"Mauchly was at home getting telephone calls all the time about what was
happening," Antonelli says. "All he could say was, 'Sit tight, we've
done the best we could.' We sat there all night in front of the TV set
with bated breath."
"It was essentially a live demo, on national TV," says Jim Senior,
historian at Unisys, the computer giant that traces its roots to
Remington Rand and Univac. "That took a lot of daring."
Under pressure, Woodbury rejiggered the algorithms. Univac then gave
Eisenhower 8-to-7 odds over Stevenson. At 9:15 p.m., Cronkite reported
that on the air. But Woodbury kept working and found he'd made a
mistake. He ran the numbers again and got the original results - an
Eisenhower landslide.
Late that night, as actual results came in, CBS realized Univac had been
right. Embarrassed, Collingwood came back on the air and confessed to
millions of viewers that Univac had predicted the results hours earlier.
In fact, the official count ended up being 442 electoral votes for
Eisenhower and 89 for Stevenson. Univac had been off by less than 1%. It
had missed the popular vote results by only 3%. Considering that the
Univac had 5,000 vacuum tubes that did 1,000 calculations per second,
that's pretty impressive. A musical Hallmark card has more computing
power.
The public latched onto the Univac's performance. In 1952, people were
as intrigued by computers as we are by SpaceShipOne. Stories ran on
newspaper front pages. "Univac" suddenly became a generic term for those
blinking electric brains. Much to IBM's disgust, when IBM introduced the
701 a few months later, people referred to it as "IBM's Univac."
In the public's mind, the Univac was the new leader in computing. And by
1956, the TV networks all used computers and predicted results early,
changing the dynamics of Election Day.
And where has that gotten us? Back to a presidential contest too close
to call, a nation worried it is vulnerable to attack, and a single
company dominating computing.
How did that happen?
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