UNIVAC

Ghost Corp Apparel — resurrecting iconic corporate ghosts.

UNIVAC—short for Universal Automatic Computer—grew from the work of J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly’s Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in Philadelphia. Remington Rand acquired that firm on February 15, 1950, and its computer operation became the foundation of the UNIVAC division.

The first UNIVAC I went to the U.S. Census Bureau on March 31, 1951, and was dedicated that June 14. In 1952, a UNIVAC I became a television-era celebrity when CBS used it to forecast Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidential victory. Not bad for a machine with the bedside manner of an industrial boiler room.

After Sperry and Remington Rand combined in 1955, UNIVAC became part of Sperry Rand. A Blue Bell engineering center opened in 1961, and the site became headquarters for Sperry Rand’s computer-systems operation in 1966. The division adopted the Sperry Univac name in 1973.

In October 1982, Sperry replaced the Sperry Univac division name with its Computer Systems operations identity, retiring the old corporate banner even as its mainframe lineage continued onward.

Our UNIVAC collection celebrates the colossal cabinets, magnetic tape, census-counting muscle, and improbably confident future-gazing of a computer name that helped make “electronic brain” sound like serious business.