Along with the military, corporations have played a significant role in the development of computer science. Many key developments in computer science have taken place in corporations, and corporations' need for computing power and technology have provided an important market for computers.

The first corporation formed to build and sell computers was the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. It was established in 1946 by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, who also created one of the first digital electronic computers, the ENIAC (Electronic and Numerical Integrator and Calculator). In 1951 the Eckert-Mauchly company made and sold a successor to ENIAC, the UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer). Fast, reliable, and useful for both scientific and business tasks, the UNIVAC was the dominant computer of the 1950s. The UNIVAC was also significant because it was the first computer that had programs stored in its memory. Before the UNIVAC, programs...