UNIVAC, in full Universal Automatic Computer, one of the earliest commercial computers. After leaving the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, J. Presper Eckert, Jr., and John Mauchly, who had worked on the engineering design of the ENIAC computer for the United States during World War II, struggled to obtain capital to build their latest design, a computer they called the Universal Automatic Computer, or UNIVAC. (In the meantime, they contracted with the Northrop Corporation to build the Binary Automatic Computer, or BINAC, which, when completed in 1949, became the first American stored-program computer.) The partners