With a glorious future behind it, Unisys Corp is having to celebrate the early days of the industry, and commemorations are planned of the first known application of computers for commercial use – (they only say that because they’ve never heard of the British Leo or Lyons Electronic Office), which Arthur Andersen & Co built for General Electric Co occurred in 1954 amid skepticism and ignorance about the computer’s potential uses in business: on May 17 and 18, many of those visionaries, including members of the original Andersen GE team, will participate in the Univac I oral history conference at the Smithsonian Ripley International Center in Washington; sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution and underwritten by Unisys Corp, the conference will be a forum for consulting pioneers to discuss applications of the Univac I back at the dawn of the information age.
