One of the most dramatic changes during my lifetime has been the development of powerful computers. Computers such as this UNIVAC 1232, were the ones I knew about when I was much younger. The mechanism on the right in the large blue box is the tape reader. It used huge spools of magnetic tape for data storage. I can distinctly remember seeing these machines when I was a teenager. This machine was developed and manufactured by Sperry Univac's St. Paul, Minnesota division and was the military version of the UNIVAC 490. It used transistors and had a 30-bit word length and came supplied with 32,000 words of memory or about 123 K. In contrast, my iPhone has 256 GB of storage. That is about 268,435,456 Kilobytes. I am currently using 8 Terabyte hard drives or about 8,000,000,000 Kilobytes.
The 1232 was not a computer. It wa a Input/Output device for a computer. It had a Fieldata Keyboard/Printer and High speed Paper reader and punch. It was originally mis-identified at the Air and Space museum. Fixed there, but not before the error spread throughout the internet.
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