3/14/2011
Reed Hollinshead
ITD Communication
208-334-8881
reed.hollinshead@itd.idaho.gov
ITD was first computer user in Boise
BOISE - Even if the name Philo T. Farnsworth is not familiar, the average American family owes a large part of their daily entertainment to him. His invention, the television, is center stage every evening in most homes. Computers are also central to today's world. Life without them is difficult to imagine.
Though not quite on a par with Farnsworth (a Rigby high school student), the Idaho Transportation Department also was a forerunner of sorts.
ITD, or more correctly the Idaho Department of Highways, was the first organization in the Boise area to be computerized, according to Association of Information Technology Professionals (AITP) Idaho chapter historian Emerson Maxson, a retired Boise State University professor.
A plaque affixed to the old Statesman building at the southwest corner of Sixth and Main Street attests to that truth. According to Maxson, the building was built for the Statesman in 1909, and the Idaho Division of Highways took up residence there in the late 50s.
The plaque, placed there last summer by the AITP, commemorates the Idaho Department of Highways as the first organization in Boise with a computer - a UNIVAC 120 from 1957.
The UNIVAC 120, a mainframe computer, was a 1953 release of the modified Remington Rand 409 Computer. It boasted of performing 360,000 addition and subtraction calculations per hour. By contrast, today's IBM-built Mira, used by the Department of Energy, can do 10 quadrillion calculations per second.
"ITD was nearly the first in the state to use computers, but that honor actually goes to Idaho National Laboratory, which was using computers from the Navy for nuclear research starting in the early 1950s," Maxson said.
"More than 1,000 UNIVAC 120 units were produced, with a price tag of nearly $100,000." Maxson said. "It was the first computer used by the Internal Revenue Service and the first computer installed in Japan. The first mini computer didn't appear until 1963, and the micro computer wasn't available until 1974."
Here'sa picture of the plaque.
The first 10 computers in city of Boise | |
Year | Organization |
1957 | Idaho Department of Highways |
1961 | Boise Cascade Corporation |
1963 | Albertsons Inc. |
1963 | Ore-Ida Foods |
1963 | Idaho Power |
1964 | Idaho State Auditor |
1964 | Mountain States Wholesale |
1965 | Intermountain Gas |
1966 | Idaho First National Bank |
1967 | Boise College |