History
Even before the completion of the Atlas (UNIVAC 1101), the Navy asked Engineering Research Associates to design a more powerful machine. This project became Task 29, and the computer was designated Atlas II.
In 1952, Engineering Research Associates asked the Armed Forces Security Agency (the predecessor of the NSA) for approval to sell the Atlas II commercially. Permission was given, on the condition that several specialized instructions would be removed. The commercial version then became the UNIVAC 1103. Because of security classification, Remington Rand management was unaware of this machine before this.
Remington Rand announced the UNIVAC 1103 in February 1953. The machine competed with the IBM 701 in the scientific computation market. In early 1954, a committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff requested that the two machines be compared for the purpose of using them for a Joint Numerical Weather Prediction project. Based on the trials, the two machines had comparable computational speed, with a slight advantage for IBM's machine, but the later was favored unanimously for its significantly faster input-output equipment.
The successor machine was the UNIVAC 1103A or Univac Scientific, which improved upon the design by replacing the unreliable Williams tube memory with magnetic core memory, adding hardware floating point instructions, and a hardware interrupt feature.
Read more about this topic: UNIVAC 1103
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