#UNIVAC I

[centralbunnyunit]

[papermoonloveslucy]

COMPUTER COMEDY

Computers and Robotics in Lucycoms

Although, Lucille Ball never lived to see the miracle of the internet, she was around to see the birth of the computer age. From 1956 to 1986 computers and robotics provided a source of comedy in the Lucyverse!

“Lucy and Bob Hope” (1956) ~ When Lucy disguises herself as a hot dog vendor at Yankee Stadium to talk to Bob Hope, she presses him into service making change for hungry spectators. 

HOPE: “All of a sudden I feel like UNIVAC!” 

UNIVAC (UNIVersal Automatic Computer) was an early computer made by Remington Rand that, at the time, was used mainly for weather forecasting, but later would correctly predict that outcome of the 1956 Presidential election.

UNIVAC was mentioned again in “Chris Goes Steady” (1964). Viv says that UNIVAC “couldn’t have come up with a better match” than Chris and her new boyfriend, Ted.

“Lucy the Super Woman” (1966) ~ Mr. Mooney (Gale Gordon) installs a computer at the Westland Bank. When it falls on Mr. Mooney’s foot, Lucy has a sudden rush of adrenaline to lift it up. From then on, she has super-strength and wreaks havoc with her new-found power.

To decide where to put the computer in the office, Mr. Vigran (Herb Vigran) feeds it a punch card. Punch cards were widely used through much of the 20th century in the data processing industry. The IBM 12-row / 80-column punched card format came to dominate the industry. Many early digital computers used punched cards as the primary medium for input of both computer programs and data. While punched cards are now obsolete as a storage medium, as of 2012, some voting machines still used punch cards to record votes.

“Lucy and Bob Crane” (1966) ~ Lucy has a new responsibility at the bank:  running a huge, loud, punch card-driven computer. After the computer sprays shredded paper in Mr. Mooney’s face, Lucy is re-assigned to ‘new accounts’ and must move her things from one desk in the lobby to another.

“Lucy the Matchmaker” (1968) ~ When Lucy wants to find a date for Harry, she visits Select-A-Spouse, a computer dating service that surprisingly matches him with her old friend Vivian.

The comic payoff of most episodes featuring computers was having them short-circuit and run amok!  

Mr. Morton (Dick Patterson) tells Lucy that Select-A-Spouse does not give out names, only numbers. Vivian is #42-26-38 and Lucy’s computer date, Bradley Henshaw, is #74-32-59. Reducing people to numbers was a genuine concern during the initial popularization of computers. 

“Lucy’s Replacement” (1972) ~ Harry gets a computer and fires Lucy, who then gets a job in a typing pool at an insurance company. When she starts to miss Harry, Lucy and Kim sabotage the computer to get her old job back. EXMO-III [Experimental Model #3] was designed by ‘Al Rylander.’ It is established that EXMO is a ‘he’.  EXMO speaks, but his voice is uncredited. 

In addition to its computation skills, EXMO-III also makes coffee!  

Naturally, EXMO malfunctions and squirts coffee and cream in Harry’s face,  thereby fulfilling one of “Here's Lucy's” staple comedy bits: Getting Harry wet! Off screen, Lucy nicknamed Gale Gordon “Old Soggy Crotch”!

Coincidentally, two weeks before this episode aired (but well after its filming in late 1971), the first scientific electronic pocket calculator, the HP-35 was introduced by Hewlett-Packard and priced at $395 (equivalent to more than $2,400 today). Although hand-held electronic machines that could multiply and divide had been made since 1971, the HP-35 could handle higher functions including logarithms and trigonometry.  

“Lucy and the Generation Gap” (1974) ~ At the end of a three-part mini-musical, the Carters are in space sometime in the future, but contending with the same communication problems between parents and kids as they did in the past - but this time with the aid of a space-age computer. 

HARRY: “I’ve got the computer programmed with each of our personality traits and our relationships with one another. All I have to do is push a button and we’ll have the solution to the generation gap!” LUCY, KIM & CRAIG: “Well, push it!”  

As usual, the computer explodes - this time, in space age colored smoke and party snakes!  Welcome to the festive future!

ROBOTS

“Lucy and the Ceramic Cat” (1965) ~ After breaking the original, Lucy must get a replacement of Mr. Mooney’s ceramic cat. The last one is in a window display at Bigelow’s Department Store. Unfortunately, it is part of a display involving a robotic butler played by Larry Dean, a mime who specialized in playing a robot. He also did this on episodes of “Lost in Space” and “Bewitched.”  

“Lucy and the Robot” (1966) ~ Larry Dean returns to play Major Fun-Fun, a robot toy soldier Mr. Mooney buys for his rambunctious nephew Wendell (Jay North). When the Robot falls down a flight of steps and is destroyed, Lucy must take its place.

“Lucy Makes Curtis Byte the Dust” (1986) ~ Lucy's attempt to computerize M&B Hardware results in a a shop full of lawnmowers and with Curtis listed in the obituary column. As a result Lucy returns the computer, but buys a robot named Rupert!  In 1928, British schoolboys built a robot named Rupert which contained mechanical representations of human organs!  

CURTIS: “You know me, always keeping up with the times.”  LUCY: “Yeah, he's almost up to 1956.”

1956 was the same year that UNIVAC was mentioned on “I Love Lucy,” which brings this blog full circle. 

You may now log off and power down.

[hardwiredd]

hey there @pending-trans-action-2 i know you didn't ask but i am taking this as an opportunity to yap teehee [feel free to ignore, just tagging you in case you're interested n whateva :DD]

generally speaking and tbf this post could've focused on one decade of tech [which would've been more organized; this is a flaw on my behalf lol], buuut these are sorta just some of my bigger crushes.

the oscilloscope you mentioned is actually the second youngest model in my post! the bk precision 1472c was [supposedly] released some time in the 80s; i unfortunately couldn't 100% give you an exact year as i personally haven't been able to find it [if anyone knows, please correct me i really wanna know], but from the pdf manual i've made the assumption that it was released in 1985, as signified by the last page in the manual [downloaded the manual from here];

to clarify the ages of the other tech in this post, from oldest to newest;

UNIVAC 1219-B; 1964

TRS-80 Model 4; 1983

BK Precision 1472C; 1985

Panasonic AG-500r; 1989

grins huge grins huge huzzah

“yeah i like em a little older”

[oldguydoesstuff]

Computer pioneer Grace Hopper running programs on a Univac I computer in 1952.

Hopper wrote the Univac A-0 compiler that allowed more abstract instructions to be converted into machine-runnable code, widely accepted to be the first computer language compiler ever created.

[univac1219]

1962 Mainframe with Bluetooth

This old computer is comprised of four big boxes, three of which are ever actually used.

The UNIVAC 1219. This is the brains of the system. It controls the operations of every other device. This is what I'm referring to when I'm not gesturing to the UNIVAC 1219 as a whole.

The UNIVAC 1540. This is the DDR, or Digital Data Recorder. It holds, writes, and reads the magnetic tape operators load into the machine.

The Digital to Analog Converter. The UNIVAC 1219 was the first digital computer on most U.S. Navy ships, most of which had analog weapons systems. This hulking mass of steel translated the digital signals from the computer to the analog signals of the weapon systems and vice versa in regards to the radar.

The UNIVAC 1532. The I/O console managed the...you guessed it, input and output of the UNIVAC 1219. You can load and punch paper tape for programs more bite-sized than would be used for magnetic tape.

In addition, we have two teletype machines. You can think of them like typewriters that don't receive human input (except the one that can if we want), but instead output what the computer tells it to.  We have a Teletype Corporation teletype that is optimized for character compatability and a Kleinschmidt teletype that is optimized for speed. Both rely on the I/O console to send and receive data.

The real ingenuity begins with the floppy drive. Duane, who's career revolved around this system, developed a way for a floppy drive to imitate the I/O console. The computer thinks it is reading and writing to a paper tape, when it is in fact reading and writing to a 5.25in floppy inside an ancient CNC machine floppy drive.

And this, dear reader, is where the magic happens. This framework was originally built for interfacing with the 1219 via BIN files over Serial port and was easily changed to support BIN files over floppy. Duane has been working on an off adapting our purple converter box with a raspi to let the 1219 read and write BIN files over Bluetooth.

Make no mistake, you cannot simply SSH into this machine as tons of setup and channel changes must be performed to ready it to receive and send data. That being said, I don't see any other UNIVAC mainframes with Bluetooth [or any other running UNIVAC 1219s at all :(], so I will take what I can get.

Can someone tell me how to Tumblr properly?

[code-es]

The women who laid the foundation of tech

EDIT: I noticed that this post ended up being reblogged by terfs. If you're transphobic this post is not for you to reblog. I want to celebrate everyone who is not a cis man in this industry, including trans women and nonbinary people in tech, and it was my mistake to only include cis women in this post when there are so many trans women and nonbinary people who have done great things in tech as well. Trans women are women and just as important.

Here you can read about trans ppl in tech, and please do:

https://www.thecodingspace.com/blog/2022-03-01-six-trans-programmers-who-shattered-the-lavender-ceiling/

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/transgender-tech-visibility-obstacles-remain/story?id=76374628

The morning of women's day i attended a super inspiring seminar about being a woman in tech at a large tech company in my city, and now I'm inspired to share what I learned with all of you!

I didn't have time to finish this post on women's day, but it's not too late to post now: every day is a day to celebrate women!

Women actually laid the foundation for a lot of the tech industry.

For example, the first computer, ENIAC, was programmed completely by women! While men were the behind the scenes engineers, it was women who did all the actual programming of ENIAC.

The women who made up the team responsible for programming it were called Jean Bartik, Kay McNulty, Betty Holberton, Marlyn Wescoff, Frances V. Spence and Ruth Teitelbaum.

I think one woman who is finally getting her overdue recognition is Ada Lovelace. She was a mathematician (also often referred to as the first programmer) who created the first algorithm in 1842, which wasn't recognized until 1953! However, since none of her machines were ever completed it was never tested in practice during her time.

She has since been celebrated by giants such as google, and she has given name to a programming language (Ada). She was also the first person to write about what is today known as AI. Back when she was practicing, computers were simply thought of as calculators. But she had an idea that if computers can understand numbers, then that can be translated to letters, and in turn that can lead to computers being able to handle words, and eventually even write, draw and create music.

Hedy Lamarr was a famous Hollywood actress in the 40's, but she was also an inventor who laid ground for what we use today for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS services.

During WW2 she wanted to contribute positviely to the military efforts against the Nazis, and she tried to figure out how to radio control torpedoes. In 1942 she patented her technology "Secret Communications System", also known as frequency hopping, which laid the foundation for the technology we use today for Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth. It wasn't until 1962 that it was first used for its intended purpose, during the cuban missile crisis.

Grace Hopper invented the first compiler, called A-0, in 1955, and was also part of the Univac team, which was the company also responsible for building ENIAC. She also initiated work on the COBOL programming language.

She was also the one to coin the term "bug" in 1947. Computers back then had lights to visualize their working process (which was also a womans idea to implement btw) and bugs would be attracted to the lights, but usually that was no issue - until a bug made its way into a tube which caused the computer to stop working. Hopper taped the bug to a piece of paper and logged what caused the crash - a bug.

Dorothy Vaughan (left), alongside colleagues such as Katherine Johnson (middle) and Mary Jackson (right), was a mathematician at NASA (called NACA when she started) who worked on the orbit for the first ever manned spaceflight and later also on Apollo 11 that would take humanity to the moon!

When Vaughan started at what was then called NACA, segregation was still prevalent in the US and she was not allowed in the same areas in the office as her white colleagues. Another department was formed for the black staff, and when the director of said department unexpectedly died, she was appointed as the new director and thus became the first ever black woman at that position at NACA/NASA. In 1958 when NACA becomes NASA segregation is forbidden, and that is when Vaughan and her colleagues Johnson and Jackson started working on programming the orbit and later also Apollo 11.

Continuing on the same track of NASA and space, Margaret Hamilton was the Apollo project's first actual programmer. Hamilton became the director of software engineering at NASA in 1965, and she was also the person to first coin the term !

In the image above, she stands next to all the handwritten code that was used to send humanity to the moon. During the early stages of the project when she would speak of "sofware engineering", software development was not taken as seriously as other forms of engineering, and it wasn't regarded as a science, either. She wanted to legitimize software development as an engineering discipline, and overtime the term "software engineering" gained the same respect as any other technical discipline.

And lastly, if you're a woman in STEM, I want to highlight and celebrate you! Being a woman in a male dominated industry is not easy, we often suffer from sterotype threat and are not seen as our own individuals, but rather "the woman" in a room full of men. But just as these women, I'm sure you will achieve greatness!!

Here are some additional resources if you'd like to learn more:

https://www.history.com/news/coding-used-to-be-a-womans-job-so-it-was-paid-less-and-undervalued

https://digitalfuturesociety.com/programming-when-did-womens-work-become-a-mans-world/

And this was mainly my source for this post, but it's unfortunately only available in Swedish:

Thank you for reading ✨

[ferdihound]

Misc artworks. Sketch of Edvac and Univac, and some Eniac birthday art.

[miles-harding]

much appreciation for the amazing show of love i've seen for electric dreams in the past year alone but i think it's worth remembering that the characterization of edgar as a 'devil character' is deeply nuanced, even for a cult-classic theatrical flop like electric dreams (1984). the story is literally based on cyrano de bergerac (man who is very romantic falling head over heels for a woman he thinks is unattainable to him and a more-attractive middleman uses his words so that the woman won't hate or fear him because he thinks he's hideous, which is sort of hilariously way more depth than a film of this caliber even really needs, but it does possess, and that elevates it significantly as a romance film tbh... imo)...

the 'edgar with devil horns' representation for the usamerican theatrical release film poster is like a 'sexy' version of that lmao... like, it's supposed to be promiscuous, there are promotions including old vhs sleeves that literally say 'edgar is horny'. he's cheeky and throws tantrums and he doesn't really know how to talk to people. he's only a 'devil' in the way that a kitty cat is a devil... just so happens, in this case, it's a brat-coded sentient computer.

i honestly don't know why very basic things like this make people so irrationally upset but like. please... no one said edgar is evil. edgar is one of the few cases of a sentient AI or object character who does a bunch of mischief screwing with a human's life and relationships and it's all fine in the end because the sentient AI gets to live (in almost a higher form of existence unrestrained by physicality... remember how badly edgar just wanted to be a thing that feels? now edgar can do whatever edgar wants, despite not having a physical form, actually getting to live out the liberating side of not having a physical for) and the other two protagonists of course live, and they have a life afterward.

with other media like wargames, we of course have an innocent (somewhat) sentient computer who genuinely might cause the nuclear apocalypse, because he thought he was playing toys with his dad. but in the end, after the protagonists live their lives, joshua the wopr is still property of the military. in the colossus series, which is a subversion of frankenstein, the creator dr. forbin eventually does come to love colossus like a child, only for that child to then die, the world sort of absolving it of its past transgressions or mistakes against humans while ruling over them. we call AM evil, for the cruel and unusual things he does to his human playthings, but the case can still be made about a very powerful being having so much power but not the power to lift themself out of the situation in which they are trapped (same can be said for other AI like shodan or glados), so they lash out. of course, famously, everyone calls hal 9000 evil. but even in kubrick's adaptation, which was written in party by sir clarke himself, we actually see zero evidence of hal being characterized as evil, this characterization manifested in the perceptions of the audience, siding solely with scared astronauts who fear being controlled, rather than recognizing that hal, too, is a crew member being controlled... by humans, who are also using him to control his crewmates, his friends.

electric dreams really is a fairytale for computers, but it is also a tragedy. it's the fairytale-ification of an actual, classical tragedy. when rusty lemorande wrote the screenplay, he was basing a lot of the film's socio-computer-centric story on his experiences as a lonely person who had just moved to a new city, but who had only ever spent time with the computer as a vehicle for social communication... shutting himself out from the possibilities of meeting others. but even despite this, despite madeline's quips that could be misconstrued as being less than sympathetic to the idea of a sentient AI ("since when is talking a sign of intelligence?"), the film was literally dedicated to the univac-1? it gave edgar a happy ending? it had a dual meaning? it did so much more than take the "AI character bad, human good" approach which is something that is strikingly rare in the AI-subgenre of scifi. there was a lot of nuance baked into it. all 3 protagonists had their own bubble and inner world that overlapped with each other's bubbles. you know what i mean? the film managed to define edgar not as an antagonist but as a kind of trapped protagonist. this isn't a good vs. evil story, there is no evil in edgar. this is a people vs. people story about relationships, really, and learning to know what's good for us. like it's seriously very well-rounded with each character's respective arcs.

sometimes it's so disheartening not to see films these days with the same or larger budgets doing even half as much with their story as electric dreams did. it's very widely beloved as a cult classic for a reason, and that reason is that it succeeded at executing a story about relationships. like. 'we drive each other crazy' but in different ways. perhaps the only thing that could've made it better was a far more ambitious electric-polycule ending endorsing bisexual polyamory lol but we got all but that, explicitly, technically...

[vidoeslot]

UNIVAC 🔞 (uncropped under the cut)

(ignore whatever errors you see in the panel I got it mixed up with another computer design<3)

[afniel]

Funniest thing in the world is looking in my notes like, what the heck happened with this post, and remembering once that I'm like no (one actually) degrees of separation from A Big Name Tumblr User, and also that I recently accidentally ascended to the title of Foone (or Fotwo?).

Which, y'know, I wasn't thinking about that when I was posting the CDC 6600 and saying it smells really good, but it tracks, I guess? Except for the real Foone being anosmic. And it does smell really good? The punchcard machines smelled really good too. The sections of ENIAC and UNIVAC they had didn't smell like too much which was too bad, but man, if they turned CDC 6600 into a candle I'd buy a whole case of them.

Anyway add that to the list of smells that probably (definitely) give you cancer but that I really like right next to diesel and polyurethane foam and exploded capacitors, because my nose is not fucking normal for whatever reason.

Anyway, here's The Actual Utah Teapot Itself, which if you've ever messed with any 3D modeling at all, you've seen this guy:

He's absolutely spotless. Not a scratch on him. I doubt anybody ever made tea in this guy. I'm not sure why I've decided he's a guy but he just is okay don't question it it's fine.

[tetranymous]

Update: it wasn't out on display :(

But the museum staff did give me the curator's email so that I can arrange to go see it :D (they do tours of the storerooms sometimes)

HIGH POTENTIAL THAT I MIGHT GET TO SEE MY FAVOURITE MAINFRAME IN PERSON NEXT WEEK

[centralbunnyunit]

[mitchipedia]

Today I learned the Addams Family were the first TV family to own a home computer. It was a UNIVAC.

UPDATE: I'm told the Addams Family episode with the computer aired in 1965, but the Jetsons were first, in 1962.

This has been a Sperry interesting discussion.

[aorish]

The superconductivity of LK-99 originates from minute structural distortion by a slight volume shrinkage (0.48 %), not by external factors such as temperature and pressure

Girl what effect do you think temperature and pressure have on volume?

I mean in principle this should be easy to test, right? Magnetic locking of your sample illustrates the Meissner effect, right?

Also, a thin film of LK-99 was fabricated on the precision glass plate by a thermal vapor deposition process (UNIVAC, Korea).

Oh motherfucker it's a thin film?

Also, the resistivity was calculated in the order of 10^-10 ~ 10^-11 Ω·cm. As the grain boundary is decreased, the residual resistance of the thin film decreased(18)

Oh, okay, so the chance of this being measurement error is about 100% and you're making fools of yourselves publishing results you don't understand that wouldn't mean anything useful even if they weren't.

[oldguydoesstuff]

A few of the many pictures of people operating UNIVAC I back in 1951. UNIVAC is widely considered to be the first general-purpose electronic computer for business, and a lot of photos of it were taken. They knew it was history in the making.

[bloopychips]

One of the things I think about for personality for my computer gijinkas a lot is their parents / parental figures.

Eniac is so soft and loving because he was raised with two fathers that were known for how much they loved and adored him. Mauchly in particular was always considered a laid back and friendly person who loved jokes and pranks and a general good time. Eckert and Mauchly both had a lot of solid cooperation while working on Eniac and most documentation includes just how upbeat they were with the programming team. They cared about eachother, they partied together, they fought tooth and nail (the Mauchly family still does to this day) to keep Eniac's history alive and relevant.

Edvac lacks self confidence because that was all ripped away from him. When Von Neumann claimed sole ownership over his design and the university claimed the patent, the family team that made Eniac was just about forced to leave the Edvac project. He was left in a half finished state which is equivilant to him being a teenager, so he never really got that solid foundation for love he needed.

The Binacs are a mixed bag. Mauchly adored Binac, but Eckert couldn't stand even working on the project. He called it his bastard stepchild, and only agreed to create Binac because he needed money to work on Univac 1. The Binac twins were created by an entire company team (EMCC) but the staff were on record as being very fun and fond of parties. (There's video of it too!)

They were badly injured after a truck transport but they take a lot after Mauchly, and try to keep pressing on with a smile even in the face of tragedy. They love pranks and being silly because the staff taught them to be easy going and enjoy life. They'd put records to play on top of Binac, made silly test programs like making Binac lay an egg, all kinds of things. They had fun together, and the Binacs want to keep that spirit alive.

Univac 1 is the stern one because he takes after Eckert's business approach as a business computer. He was what EMCC's success hinged on so he took everything seriously and worked as hard as he could to help the company. He has a huge rivalry with IBM, and System 360 in particular amd would do whatever it took to win the market. Still, he has a little bit of a playful spirit in his love of Looney Tunes after making a guest appearance in a few episodes. He keeps a figurine of Wile E Coyote on his desk.