Evening star. [volume], October 07, 1956, Page 8, Image 164

About Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972

Image provided by: Library of Congress, Washington, DC

                
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Univoc helps make possible a new concordance this year. Rose Pisciotta, an employe
in the Remington Rand's New York office, reads a new standard version of the Bible,
every word of which has been stored on magnetic tapes Last concordance, pub
lished in 1894, took 30 years to compile. Univac can do it in about IQO hours
Between operator and Univoc is the supervisory con
trol which gives a continuous picture of operations
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High speed input-output of Univac utilizes data recorded on magnetic tape. Such
data can be fed to this computer, in New York, at the rate of 20,000 items per second.
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THE SUNOAV STAR MAGAZINE. WASHINGTON 0 C., OCTOBER 7 1956
Continued From Preceding Page.
in figuring the big equation on who will be President. Along
with the experts is a staff of coders, programmers and
analysts, the people who collect election data, plot significant
trends, translate them into mechanical procedure and cor
relate them mathematically
From previous experience, experts have learned that
checking the information fed into Univac is an important
problem. They have re-run the 1952 and '54 results to find
out what would have happened if certain information, then
available, had been used This time, the monitoring will
be rigid.
In 1952, a year after Univac came out, it was used to
interpret voting trends in the Eisenhower-Stevenson contest
An hour and a half after Eastern polls closed, Univac pre
dicted an Eisenhower sweep of 43 States and an electoral vote
spread of 438 to 93. Those directing the operation refused
to believe it and fed in other information tending to equalize
the lop-sided forecast. Gen. Eisenhower actually carried 39
States with 442 votes to Stevenson’s 9 with 89
Univac s first prediction in 1954 gave the Democrats 227
House seats and the Republicans 207, only five votes off the
official 232 to 203. The Senate forecast was 56 to 39, and
the end result was 49 to 47. During the evening, a switch
came about when one set of returns was mistakenly reported
in reverse. But after 10:30 p.m., Univac was back to its first
and most likely prediction.
Dr. Woodbury was associate professor of statistics at the
University of Pennsylvania when he first tackled election
computing. The Utah-born professor launched his career with
a Ph. D. at the University of Michigan. His familiarity with
computers ied to his post with GWU, and the Navy borrowed
him. Dr. Mauchiy, a Ph. D. in physics at Johns Hopkins
University, was once connected with the Bureau of Standards.
With J. P Evkert, jr., he designed Eniac, the first automatic
computer, for ballistics researchers at Aberdeen Proving
Grounds \
But Univac, widely used by Government agencies and for
guided missile work, is but the prototype of things to come.
One is now building at Berkeley, Calif., known as LARC, which
does things in three dimensions. Initial cost is just under
$3 million
As far as elections are concerned. Dr. Woodbury watches
for patterns but has one solid maxim: Don’t ignore the State
from which there are ho returns
Star Photos by Elwood Baker