Today in 1937, Howard Aiken, an instructor in the Department of Physics at Harvard University, having been turned down by the leading manufacturer of calculators (the Monroe Calculating Machine Company), submitted a proposal to IBM, titled “Proposed Automatic Calculating Machine.”
I. Bernard Cohen in Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer: “Soon thereafter, the engineers at IBM and the Harvard authorities began to refer to the machine as a ‘calculating plant.’ That, in fact, was the name IBM used in its contract with Harvard.”
Aiken conceived of this first computer, which became to be known as the Harvard Mark I, as a tool to aid in scientific calculations. Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray in Computer:
The dedication of the Harvard Mark I [on August 7, 1944] captured the imagination of the public to an extraordinary extent and gave headline writers a field day. American Weekly called it “Harvard Robot Super-Brain” while Popular Science Monthly declared “Robot Mathematician Knows All the Answers.”
Also today, in 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected U.S. President, taking over 55% of the popular vote and winning 39 of the 48 states. It was the first time two of the major television networks used computers to predict the election results.
CBS used a Univac computer weighing 25,000 lbs., while NBC opted for Monrobot, a smaller “electronic brain.” In contrast, ABC’s News Director John Madigan professed a disdain for such gimmicks, declaring: “We’ll report our results through Elmer Davis, John Daly, Walter Winchell, Drew Pearson—and about 20 other human brains,” according to Time Magazine.
The Univac used by CBS was too big — 25,000 lbs — to move to Manhattan, so a CBS TV camera was installed at Remington Rand’s offices in Philadelphia.
Philip Elmer-Dewitt, “Television Machines That Think,” Time Magazine, April 6, 1992:
When CBS hired a newly minted Univac to analyze the vote in the 1952 presidential election, network officials thought it a nifty publicity stunt. But when the printout appeared, an embarrassed Charles Collingwood reported that the machine couldn’t make up its mind. It was not until after midnight that CBS confessed the truth: Univac had correctly predicted Dwight Eisenhower would swamp Adlai Stevenson in one of the biggest landslides in history, but nobody believed it.
30 years later, on November 4, 1982, Compaq announced the suitcase-sized, IBM-compatible Compaq Portable, an early laptop computer about the size of a portable sewing machine, weighing 28 lbs.