The Sperry Corporation was an electronics company and the UNIVAC Division manufactured the first commercial digital computer. The Sperry UNIVAC division has its origins in the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC), founded in 1946 by J. Presper Eckert (1919-1995) and John W. Mauchly (1907-1980). In 1950, Eckert and Mauchly sold their firm to Remington Rand, Inc, a major manufacturer of business machines, who continued development of the UNIVAC system. The collection documents predecessor organizations to the Sperry Corporation, including the Remington Typewriter Company, the Rand Kardex Company, and the Sperry Gyroscope Company; the formation of the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation; the development of the UNIVAC brand under Remington Rand, Inc.; Philadelphia and St. Paul branches of the UNIVAC division; the UNIVAC manufacturing plant in Bristol, Tennessee; and Sperry divisions outside of UNIVAC, including Sperry Gyroscope Flight and Defense Systems, and Remington Rand office equipment.

Documents in this series trace the technological history of electronic data processing at Sperry Rand From the 1950s to the mid 1970s, as they describe the development of five generations of computers. The archive traces the evolving relationship between hardware and software. It shows that the earliest programs for the ENIAC were done in a machine language that mirrored the physical construction of the computer. With the introduction of stored programs, full computer languages such as COBOL were developed. The records document the development of the UNIVAC algebraic short language code by Grace Hopper in the early 1950s. Software publications files trace innovations in UNIVAC software from 1958 to 1970 and show how software engineers sought to maximize hardware potential.