| Description |
Second in a series of 4 programmes which tells the human stories of some of the computer pioneers in three countries, Britain, America and the Ukraine. Each is a little cameo of social history of the early postwar years half a century ago, from a time when in the words of one of them “everything you did was new, no-one had ever done it before”. No anorak needed to enjoy these programmes!
“Saluting the Moose” (6/11/01)
This programme joins a group of retired engineers who meet every Fall in Connecticut to re-discover the forgotten history of the first American business computer. They worked for Remington Rand, in a converted barn that still “smelled of horses” and had a stuffed moose’s head overlooking them as they worked. Best known for its mechanical calculators before the war, the move into computers was fiercely opposed by senior executives – few people in those days thought businesses would ever need computers. But by 1949 they had more orders for the first model, the Rand-409, than they could cope with. Meantime two brilliant engineers, but hopeless businessmen, were building their own machine over a clothes shop in Philadelphia. The widow of one of them, mathematician Kathleen Mauchly, had the job title of “computer” during World War II, when with dozens of other human computers she calculated ballistics tables for the armed forces. She recalls the trials and the successes of her husband’s machine which was bought up by Rand when they ran out of money. Renamed the “Univac” it burst into public consciousness by correctly predicting a landslide victory for Eisenhower in the 1952 Presidential Election, beating all the human pundits – the computer operator on duty that night takes us behind the scenes. |