UNIVAC: the troubled life of America's first computer

During the Second World War, two teams in the United States were deployed to improve the calculations necessary for artillery firing and strategic bombing. Hopper worked with Harvard mathematician Howard Aiken, whose Mark I computer performed computations for the Navy. John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert's Electronic and Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) rolled out rocket firing tables for the Army.

Over the course of five years, the two developers rethought everything associated with computational machines. The result was a device that went way beyond the age of punch card calculators associated with IBM devices. The UNIVAC, unveiled in 1951, was the fruit of this effort...