Company
AbsorbedRemington Rand
New York · 1927 – 1955
Merged with Sperry in 1955. The computer line later passed into Unisys, formed in 1986.
Remington Rand was formed in 1927 by merging the Remington Typewriter Company with Rand Kardex and other office-machine firms. It sold typewriters, filing systems, and shavers. During the war it also made bombsights. In 1950 it bought the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation, the company that had built ENIAC and was trying to sell UNIVAC.
UNIVAC I was delivered to the Census Bureau in 1951. Remington Rand was, for a few years, ahead of IBM in electronic computers and behind it in everything that made a business customer feel safe. IBM's sales force was the difference. The better-known machine was not the one most companies leased.
Programmers for hire, once
A UNIVAC installation employed operators, engineers, and the first generation of programmers who were not working for a university or the military. Remington Rand had to teach customers a job that did not yet have a steady name. The typewriter division, meanwhile, still employed the factory and the salesmen of the older office. Two eras of the museum's timeline sat inside one letterhead.
Sperry, then Unisys
In 1955 Remington Rand merged with Sperry to form Sperry Rand. The UNIVAC name continued. In 1986 Sperry and Burroughs merged into Unisys. There is no Remington Rand to write to. Unisys still exists and still services large systems. The page stops at the 1955 merger because that is when the company that had bought Eckert and Mauchly ceased to be itself.
The work it organized
- Typewriter assembler
- UNIVAC operator
- Programmer
- Sales engineer
On the timeline
Related
- E. Remington and SonsDissolved
- IBMActive