Toasted Dolphin

Posted: **Mon Sep 19, 2011 5:06 pm**

"Well, Walter, If you would like candidate A to win the election, press this button. For candidate B, press this one. Everyone in the country will learn to trust the prediction of this machine.

Wait to you see what can be done with the partially punched cards in a recount.

This isn't even a real computer, just a prop built to display on your TV broadcast. Before you make your selection Walter, check with the boys in the backroom. They are from the banks and Standard Oil. Make sure they approve your pick. You don't want your news story to have an 'unhappy' ending, do you?."

It was November 4, 1952, and Americans huddled in their living rooms to follow the results of the Presidential race between General Dwight David Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, Governor of Illinois.

On that night they witnessed the birth of an even newer technology—a machine that could predict the election's results. Sitting next to the desk of CBS Anchor Walter Cronkite was a mockup of a huge gadget called a UNIVAC (UNIVersal Automatic Computer), which Cronkite explained would augur the contest. J. Presper Eckert, the UNIVAC's inventor, stood next to the device and explained its workings. The woman who actually programmed the mainframe, Navy mathematician Grace Murray Hopper was nowhere to be seen; for days her team had input voting statistics from earlier elections, then wrote the code that would allow the calculator to extrapolate the contest based on previous races.

To the disquietude of national pollsters expecting a Stevenson victory, Hopper's UNIVAC group predicted a huge landslide for Eisenhower, and with only five percent of the results. CBS executives didn't know what to make of this bold finding. "We saw [UNIVAC] as an added feature to our coverage that could be very interesting in the future," Cronkite later recalled. "But I don't think that we felt the computer would become predominant in our coverage in any way."

And so CBS told its audience that UNIVAC only foresaw a close race. At the end of the evening, when it was clear that UNIVAC's actual findings were spot on, a spokesperson for the company that made the machine was allowed to disclose the truth—that the real prediction had been squelched.

UNIVAC: the troubled life of America's first computer

Posted: **Mon Sep 19, 2011 5:37 pm**

Well I guess that explains this to...

Posted: **Mon Sep 19, 2011 5:46 pm**

The Chicago Tribune, which had once referred to Truman as a "nincompoop".

Few know that the voting algorithms are programmed to watch for a candidate's name followed by the word, nincompoop, and then allocates 70% of the votes to him.

Posted: **Mon Sep 19, 2011 5:48 pm**

The last election that was called right was Lincoln- Douglas and that was on Dr Exile's Commodore 64.

Posted: **Mon Sep 19, 2011 5:55 pm**

Actual code hacked from the voting system...

Code: Select all

index1 = search(text, 0, candidate)
if (index1)
 {index2 = search(text, index1, 'nincompoop')}

if (index1 and index2)
 {allocatevotes = 70}

if (candidate == 'Palin)
{
 allocatevotes = 0
 issue(WTF)
 halt(with LOL)
}

Posted: **Tue Sep 20, 2011 7:20 pm**

Nincompoop by a nose.

Toasted Dolphin

Univac and the 1952 election

Univac and the 1952 election

Re: Univac and the 1952 election

Re: Univac and the 1952 election

Re: Univac and the 1952 election

Re: Univac and the 1952 election

Re: Univac and the 1952 election