From "Heart of the Hub" by Ronald Q. Smith, UniReview, August 1991:

   "In Jan. 1946, several ex-Navy officers in St. Paul Minn. formed a 
company called Engineering Associates (ERA) to build computers for the 
Navy.  In August of the next year, ERA received approval to strat a
project called Task 13 -- the design of a general-purpose, stored
program computer.  This computer, code-named Atlas I, was delivered
to the Navy in 1950.  A commercial version of the computer, dubbed 1101
(the number 13 expressed in binary form), was delivered in 1951.  That
same year, ERA was acquired by Remington Rand Corp., a company with
roots dating back to 1873.
    Several years earlier, Remington Rand had purchased Eckert-Mauchly
Computer Corp., builders of the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator
and Calculator) for the U.S. Army.  In 1951, Remington Rand delivered
UNIVAC I, which Eckert Mauchly had begun developing two years previously.
    In 1955, Remington Rand merged with Sperry to form Sperry Rand Corp.
The Eckert-Mauchly and ERA arms of the company were unified to form the
UNIVAC division, which later became the Sperry UNIVAC division until the
UNIVAC designation was dropped altogether.  In 1986, Burroughs and Sperry
merged to form Unisys Corp., and the rest is computing history."


There is also a *very* good paper written by George Gray of the State of
Georgia Department of Administrative Services (DOAS) entitled...

	      "ENIAC, UNIVAC and other early AC's"

...which was presented at one of the 1990 National USE Conferences and
is published in the Conference Procedings.  His paper covers much more
detail than the caption above and starts way back at the 1880 Census 
with card punch machines.

<About ERA:>

I believe that's "Engineering Research Associates".  My dad worked there
from about 1951 to about 1964.  Just as an interesting aside, he told me
that at one time they were building two computers.  They were each 12-bit,
4K memory computers.  One was made from transistors, the other from what
I think he called "magnetic amplifiers".  The reason they made the same
machine with both types of technology was apparently that they didn't
know whether they would ever be able to make transistors in quantity...