The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

by Walter Isaacson

With its flashing lights and Hollywood aura, UNIVAC became famous when CBS featured it on election night in 1952. Walter Cronkite, the young anchor of the network’s coverage, was dubious that the huge machine would be much use compared to the expertise of the network’s correspondents, but he agreed that it might provide an amusing spectacle for viewers. Mauchly and Eckert enlisted a Penn statistician, and they worked out a program that compared the early results from some sample precincts to the outcomes in previous elections. By 8:30 p.m. on the East Coast, well before most of the nation’s polls had closed, UNIVAC predicted, with 100-to-1 certainty, an easy win for Dwight Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson. CBS initially withheld UNIVAC’s verdict; Cronkite told his audience that the computer had not yet reached a conclusion. Later that night, though, after the vote counting confirmed that Eisenhower had won handily, Cronkite put the correspondent Charles Collingwood on the air to admit that UNIVAC had made the prediction at the beginning of the evening but CBS had not aired it. UNIVAC became a celebrity and a fixture on future election nights.77