The Remington Rand

Remington Rand

Remington Rand was an early American business machines manufacturer, best known originally as a typewriter manufacturer and in a later incarnation as the manufacturer of the UNIVAC line of mainframe computers but with antecedents in Remington Arms in the early nineteenth century. For a time, the...

 409 control panel

Plugboard

A plugboard, or control panel , is an array of jacks, or hubs, into which patch cords can be inserted to complete an electrical circuit. Control panels were used to direct the operation of some unit record equipment...

 programmed punched card

Punched card

A punched card, punch card, IBM card, or Hollerith card is a piece of stiff paper that contains digital information represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions...

 calculator, designed in 1949, was sold in two models: the UNIVAC 60 (1952) and the UNIVAC 120 (1953). The model number referred to the number of decimal digits of vacuum tube

Vacuum tube

In electronics, a vacuum tube, electron tube , or thermionic valve , reduced to simply "tube" or "valve" in everyday parlance, is a device that relies on the flow of electric current through a vacuum...

 memory storage provided for data.

The machine was designed in "The Barn", at 33 Highland Ave. in Rowayton, Connecticut

Rowayton, Connecticut

Rowayton is a section of Norwalk, Connecticut. Located on the Long Island Sound just 45 miles from New York City, Rowayton is a coastal New England village...

, a building that currently houses the Rowayton Public Library and Community Center.

These machines were discontinued when the UNIVAC 1004 was introduced in 1962. About 1000 total had been produced by 1961.

Architecture

Numbers were fixed point variable length (1 to 10 digits). Arithmetic was done in floating point, but all results were converted to fixed point when stored in memory.

Digits are represented in bi-quinary coded decimal

Bi-quinary coded decimal

Bi-quinary coded decimal is a numeral encoding scheme used in many abacuses and in some early computers, including the Colossus. The term bi-quinary indicates that the code comprises both a two-state and a five-state component...

. Each digit of memory storage contained 5 tubes, representing the digits 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9.

Digit	1	3	5	7	9
0
1	*
2	*				*
3		*
4		*			*
5			*
6			*		*
7				*
8				*	*
9					*

External links

• Rowayton, Connecticut: Birthplace of the World's First Business Computer
• Rowayton Public Library Website
• Universal Automatic Computer Model 60 A Third Survey of Domestic Electronic Digital Computing Systems Report No. 1115, March 1961 by Martin H. Weik
• Universal Autometic Computer Model 120 A Third Survey of Domestic Electronic Digital Computing Systems Report No. 1115, March 1961 by Martin H. Weik
• Service and Programming documentation at bitsavers.org