"Its awfully early, but Ill go out on a limb," read the printout, just above the prediction that the winner of the 1952 presidential election would be Dwight Eisenhower. Onlookers were skeptical, but with only 1 percent of the vote counted, the Universal Automatic Computerbetter known as Univachad calculated the winner.

The demonstration was a milestone in the pioneering machines somewhat shaky journey from the laboratory to the real world. The Univac was created by J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly, University of Pennsylvania scientists who in 1946 left academia to form a computer company. Financial woes forced the pair to sell the business to New York-based Remington Rand, though they continued to work from their Philadelphia offices. In 1951, Remington Rand shipped the first Univac to the U.S. Census Bureau. Weighing 13,000 kilograms and boasting more than 5,000 vacuum tubes, the Univac multiplied figures more than 50 times faster than the eras punch-card calculators.