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UNIVAC 1101


The ERA 1101, later renamed UNIVAC 1101, was a computer system designed and built by Engineering Research Associates (ERA) in the early 1950s and continued to be sold by the Remington Rand corporation after that company later purchased ERA. Its (initial) military model, the ERA Atlas, was the first stored-program computer in the U.S. that was moved from its site of manufacture and successfully installed at a distant site. Remington Rand used the 1101's architecture as the basis for a series of machines into the 1960s.

ERA was formed from a group of code-breakers working for the United States Navy during World War II. The team had built a number of code-breaking machines, similar to the more famous Colossus computer in England, but designed to attack Japanese codes. After the war the Navy was interested in keeping the team together even though they had to formally be turned out of Navy service. The result was ERA, which formed in St. Paul, Minnesota in the hangars of a former Chase Aircraft shadow factory.

After the war, the team continued to build codebreaking machines, targeted at specific codes. After one of these codes changed, making an expensive computer obsolete, the team convinced the Navy that the only way to make a system that would remain useful was to build a fully programmable computer. The Navy was convinced, and in 1947 they funded development of a new system under "Task 13". The resulting machines, known as "Atlas", used drum memory for main memory and featured a simple central processing unit built for integer math. The first Atlas machine was built, moved, and installed at the Army Security Agency by December 1950. A faster version using Williams tubes and drums was delivered to the NSA in 1953.


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