UNIVAC (UNIVersal Automatic Computer), invented in 1950 by the physicist J. Presper Eckert and the engineer John Mauchly, was the first commercial computer to be widely available. The German engineer Konrad Zuse's Z machines were available several years earlier in Europe, but not in quantity, and they were unknown in the United States. UNIVAC was the first commercial computer to use stored programs, in which the computer reads the program from storage into its memory and follows its instructions to process data.

UNIVAC grew out of two computers Eckert and Mauchly worked on for the United States Army at the University of Pennsylvania during World War II, ENIAC and EDVAC. ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Calculator), which they designed and patented, featured vacuum-tube processors and could add and subtract twenty-digit decimal numbers. It also performed multiplication. Though faster than earlier computers, ENIAC required considerable human interaction to perform a...