The
UNIVAC 120 was introduced in the first quarter of 1953, it was a vacuum tube machine,
that accepted punch cards as input and was programmed via wires inserted in a
plug board. The plug board was
14" by 22" with 3,264 holes the size of a match stick.The computer weighed 3,230 pounds
and used 168 square feet of working space. It included a built in air conditioner that weighed 700
additional pounds and included four 15 inch fans. It contained 800 vacuum tubes and could store 438 digits of information.
The computer was named to take advantage of the prominence
of the first UNIVAC produced by the Eckert/Mauchly group acquired by Remington Rand in 1950. Over one thousand units were
produced before being replaced by the UNIVAC 1004 in 1962, the last plugboard computer produced by the UNIVAC Division.
It was the first computer used by the Internal Revenue Service and the first computer installed in
Japan.
The location of
the department at that time was
sixth and main in the old Idaho Statesman building.