Sale To Remington Rand
As had happened with BINAC, EMCC's estimates of delivery dates and costs proved to be optimistic, and the company was soon in financial difficulty again. In early 1950, the company was for sale; potential buyers included National Cash Register and Remington Rand. Remington Rand made the first offer, and purchased EMCC on February 15, 1950, whereupon it became the UNIVAC division of Remington Rand. The first UNIVAC was not delivered until March 1951, over a year after EMCC was acquired by Remington Rand, and too late to help much for the 1950 census. However, upon acceptance at the company premises, truck load after truck load of punched cards arrived to be recorded on tape (by what was called jokingly the card to pulp converters) for processing by UNIVAC. The Census Bureau used the prototype UNIVAC on EMCC premises for months. Mauchly resigned from Remington Rand in 1952; his 10-year contract with them ran until 1960, and prohibited him from working on other computer projects during that time. Remington Rand merged with Sperry Corporation in 1955, and in 1975, the division was renamed Sperry UNIVAC. The company's corporate descendant today is Unisys.
There is a story about the acceptance by the Census Bureau that must not be lost to history. On the appointed morning officials from the Census Bureau arrived for a briefing about the acceptance test. The briefing was followed by a long lunch off site, at which Remington shavers were presented to all. While all that went on, the EMCC team ran the acceptance test and recorded the results on a magnetic tape, leaving that tape near the computer. After lunch, the acceptance team gathered to witness the test. The test tape was installed on a magnetic tape drive, and the operator sat at the supervisory control console. With all ready, the operator then hit the wrong button, erasing the test program tape. Disaster? No! He then got up, installed the program tape to run what was called the "New Old Faithful" program tape, and ran that program which exercised every function UNIVAC could perform. That went on for the expected time, after which the operator stopped the program, rose, removed the tape from the tape drive, went behind the tape drives (a row of machines about the size of file cabinets), and swapped the tape he had removed for the morning's acceptance test results tape. That tape was then installed on the printer and the expected results were printed to the delight of the acceptance team. The name of the operator has been omitted for obvious reasons.
Read more about this topic: Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation
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