[Music] but in 1948 when things looked hopeless for ekot and Morley's company help came from a most unlikely Source rers [Music] up and the American totalizator company makers of the mechanical equipment that calculated odds and displayed the winnings at racetracks was headed by Harry Strauss a man of vision Strauss foresaw the day when computers might replace his totalizator equipment to hedge his bets Strauss purchased a 40% interest in eut Morley injecting desperately needed funds into the company for the next year the OT Morley computer company underwent rapid expansion the staff increased from 40 to 134
but this Prosperity would be shortlived ekot and Morley's last best best hope vanished when Harry Strauss died in a plane crash in October 1949 one month later strauss's Partners notified otan Morley they wanted out of the computer business when they just wanted to get out of something which they regarded as a financial loss they also didn't think it was going to work they didn't have any faith in it as Mr Strauss did and so they encouraged us to get somebody else to buy the IDE out as soon as possible without backing the echat Morley computer
company sank deeper into debt the pair who had started off with such high hopes were forced to sell out to Remington Rand Remington Rand sold a variety of products including typewriters filing cabinets and punched card tabulating machines but to the general public they were best known known for their electric shavers James Rand president of Remington Rand liked to speculate in new Ventures he also wanted to gain a foothold in this new field of electronics the brand name univac from now on would belong not to Orton Morley but to Remington Rand under Remington Ran's label the
first univac was finally delivered to the US Census Bureau almost a year late and considerably over budget it was America's first commercially built computer yet it only rated a Backpage story Little noticed by the general public but within a year the name univac would be on the lips of millions of Americans thanks to a brilliant public relations move by Remington Rand good evening everyone this is Walter cranite speaking to you from CBS television election headquarters here in New York City CBS were convinced that to win the Lion's Share of the election night audience what they
needed was a univac computer in studio to forecast the result turn to that Miracle of the Modern Age the electronic brain univac and Charles Collingwood this is the face of a univac a univac is a fabulous electronic machine which we have borrowed to help us predict this election from the basis of the early returns as they come in univac is going to try to predict the winner for us just as early as we can possibly get the returns in for the first time a computer was about to predict the outcome of an election first of
all let me tell you a little bit about the theory of this this is not a joke or a trick it's an experiment we think it's going to work we don't know we hope it'll work at any rate for the at 8:00 Collingwood asked univac to type predic unac can you tell us uh what your prediction is now on the basis of the returns that we've had so far have you got a prediction for us univac I don't know I think that univac is probably an honest machine a good deal more honest than a lot
of commentators who are working and he doesn't think he's got enough to tell us anything about yet but we'll be back with him later in the evening now back to what Callingwood didn't know was that univac did did have something to say and this was it just before CBS went on the air univac predicted Eisenhower would beat Stevenson by a landslide the problem was no one believed it the machine turned out this answer that they didn't believe the polls were telling them that was going to be about a 50/50 election and we were telling them
it's a landslide with only 5% of the vote and they couldn't believe that you could predict the thing as accurately as we did which was in a few percent with only 5% the vote so everybody was thrown into total confusion the Republic excuse me thear but the confusion wouldn't last long votes were now pouring in for Eisenhower even before all the polls closed it was clear that univac had been right all along General Eisenhower was winning by the largest landslide in the nation's history after midnight CBS confessed to the public what had happened you saw
as the prediction as more votes came in the odds came back and it was obviously evident that we should have had nerve enough to believe the machine in the first place it was right we were wrong next year we'll believe it the next day the headlin said it all the whole world had taken notice of univac it wasn't long before univac began appearing in the movies not like one of these machines where you push a button and it just does what you want it to do not a robot I'm people I [Music] quit while unifac
captured the attention of Hollywood it was at last catching the eye of its intended customers by the end of 1953 there were three univac installed and more orders were coming in and there seemed to be no competition in sight not even from Remington Ran's closest [Music] rival today the name IBM is synonymous with computers but in the 1940s the company showed little interest in these new machines IBM seemed content to stay with the punched card tabulating equipment that it had pioneered at the turn of the century for 50 years IBM had grown rich on a
technology that would soon be rendered obsolete by electronic computers at first they didn't recognize it but when the Census Bureau who used hundreds of IBM's tabulators ordered their univac one IBM vice president became alarmed Tom Watson Jr I'll never forget how I felt about the eer monley contract in the Census Bureau I felt a sense of great panic and uh went back to washing to New York City from Washington and had a late night conference saying look we this is the beginning of the end for the IBM company unless we recognize it and do something
about it Thomas Watson Jr knew that IBM could lose everything to computers but nothing was done at IBM without his father approval and Mr Watson senior saw no commercial future in these new fangled machines but when I'd say well look Dad if we don't take this business somebody else will take it for us because the we're now being pushed by the market we're Market driven we're not driving the market the market is driving us we ought to try to get a head up some stormy sessions getting there but at the end of the road he
was agreeable when in 1951 IBM finally took its first steps into the computer age some 5 years after OT and Morley had began building univac it was with a scientific computer rather than a commercial one however the big New Market wasn't in selling computers to scientists but to businesses and univac was slowly stealing away IBM's business customers within two years the younger Watson had a free hand in the company Thomas Watson senior finally stepped aside in favor of his son who vowed to focus all his energy beating [Music] univac and this was the inexpensive machine
with which he launched his attack in 1953 technologically it seemed no match for the univac designed to run in conjunction with IBM's conventional punch card equipment it was slow but Watson had a secret weapon which would compensate for any crudeness in the technology the IBM sales force his dad had left him Thomas Watson senior had had a ferocious approach to sales and a superb understanding of salesmen he rewarded them with high commissions pushed them with quotas inspired them with speeches educated them in classrooms and punished them if they didn't tow the line and it worked
