The UNIVAC 1102 or ERA 1102 was designed by Engineering Research Associates

Engineering Research Associates

Engineering Research Associates, commonly known as ERA, was a pioneering computer firm from the 1950s. They became famous for their numerical computers, but as the market expanded they became better known for their drum memory systems. They were eventually purchased by Remington Rand and merged...

 for the United States Air Force

United States Air Force

The United States Air Force is the aerial warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the American uniformed services. Initially part of the United States Army, the USAF was formed as a separate branch of the military on September 18, 1947 under the National Security Act of...

's Arnold Engineering Development Center

Arnold Engineering Development Center

Arnold Engineering Development Center is a ground-based flight test facility operated by the US Air Force Materiel Command.-Mission statement:The AEDC mission is to:...

 in Tullahoma, Tennessee

Tullahoma, Tennessee

-Demographics:As of the census of 2010, there were 18,655 people, 7,717 households, and 5,161 families residing in the city. The racial makeup of the city was 88.1% White, 7.0% African American, 0.2% Native American, 1.2% Asian, 1.1% from other races, and 2.5% from two or more races...

 in response to a request for proposal issued in 1950. The Air Force needed three computers to do data reduction for two wind tunnel

Wind tunnel

A wind tunnel is a research tool used in aerodynamic research to study the effects of air moving past solid objects.-Theory of operation:Wind tunnels were first proposed as a means of studying vehicles in free flight...

s and an engine test facility.

The 1102 was a variant of the UNIVAC 1101

UNIVAC 1101

The UNIVAC 1101, or ERA 1101, was a computer system designed by Engineering Research Associates and built by the Remington Rand corporation in the 1950s. It was the first stored program computer in the U.S. that was moved from its site of manufacture and successfully installed at a distant site...

, using its 24-bit word and a smaller (only 8,192 words) drum memory

Drum memory

Drum memory is a magnetic data storage device and was an early form of computer memory widely used in the 1950s and into the 1960s, invented by Gustav Tauschek in 1932 in Austria....

. The machine had 2,700 vacuum tube

Vacuum tube

In electronics, a vacuum tube, electron tube , or thermionic valve , reduced to simply "tube" or "valve" in everyday parlance, is a device that relies on the flow of electric current through a vacuum...

s, weighed 14000 pounds (6,350.3 kg), and occupied 122 square feet (11.3 m²) of floor area.

The computers were connected to data channels coming from the wind tunnels and the engine facility. There were five typewriter

Typewriter

A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical device with keys that, when pressed, cause characters to be printed on a medium, usually paper. Typically one character is printed per keypress, and the machine prints the characters by making ink impressions of type elements similar to the pieces...

s for printed output, five paper tape punches

Punched tape

Punched tape or paper tape is an obsolete form of data storage, consisting of a long strip of paper in which holes are punched to store data...

, and four pen plotters to produce graphs.

The three computers and related peripherals were delivered between July 1954 and March 1956 at a total price of $1,400,000. Software for the computers was developed entirely at the Arnold Engineering Development center. All programming was done in machine code

Machine code

Machine code or machine language is a system of impartible instructions executed directly by a computer's central processing unit. Each instruction performs a very specific task, typically either an operation on a unit of data Machine code or machine language is a system of impartible instructions...

 (assemblers and compiler

Compiler

A compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a programming language into another computer language...

s were never developed).

See also

• List of UNIVAC products
• History of computing hardware
  History of computing hardware
  The history of computing hardware is the record of the ongoing effort to make computer hardware faster, cheaper, and capable of storing more data....