TIMELINES
We’re Counting on You
Fifty thousand additions per second! The Univac of North Carolina
William M. Whyburn’s initial musings about computers were the result of conversations he
had with people at the Oak Ridge
National Laboratory and the Office of
Naval Research. It was 1951, and Why-
burn, professor of mathematics, became
convinced UNC would need “a computer
of the fastest and most versatile type if its
instructional and research needs of the
immediate future were to be met.”
Visionary? He was thinking about
something virtually nonexistent on a col-
lege campus. It was a time, in fact, when
IBM Corp.’s own expectations of the mar-
ket for computers that could do scientific
calculations were quite modest.
In 1956, Whyburn took Bill Friday ’ 48
(LLB) and Billy Carmichael ’ 21, president
and vice president of the UNC System, to
New York, where they were formally
offered a Univac computer that was essen-
tially a gift from the company; the terms
were similar to the recent installations at
Harvard and Penn. The U.S. Census Bureau
already was interested in having Carolina
help process the first computerized census
in 1960.
The campus entity now known as
Information Technology is 50 years old this
year, and its birth date is the arrival of a
Remington Rand Univac 1105 to the
super-reinforced ground floor of an addition to Phillips Hall built primarily for it.
School groups and Scout troops came to
see the 60-foot-long room full of tape
drives and magnetic drums, 7,200 vacuum
tubes and the operator’s console with its
bank of curiously blinking lights. The “8th
wonder of the world,” the “marvelous
monster” had its own scale model on display in the Morehead Building.
The price tag was almost beyond comprehension — $2.45 million — and the
state paid only $225,000. The Census
Bureau had an option on daily use of it
until 1968; the rest of the time UNC could
process data, store its records and perform
research in chemistry, city planning,
forestry, math, biostatistics and business
administration. It could do 40,000 to
50,000 additions, 20,000 multiplications
and up to 20,000 divisions per second, and
it could store 8,192 words accessible in 8
millionths of a second.
The Univac’s dedication brochure
proclaimed that “experts are already
speaking of the ‘computer revolution’
and foretelling the introduction of
computer-oriented mathematics as early
as the 9th grade.” Similar computers were
found at just a handful of schools —
MIT, Berkeley, Michigan, UCLA and
What was known as
the Univac Machine
Room was in the
basement of the
then-new addition to
Phillips Hall in 1959.
Computers that run
campus Information
technology were
located in this same
room until three
years ago. It was a
rarity on a college
campus then and
such a wonder to
Carolina visitors that
it was re-created in
miniature in a gallery
in the Morehead
Building.
UNC PHOTO LAB
