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Burroughs Corporation
From Wikipedia,
The Burroughs Corporation began in 1886 as the American
Arithmometer Company in St. Louis, Missouri selling an adding
machine invented by William Seward Burroughs.
The company moved to Detroit in 1904 and changed its name to
the Burroughs Adding Machine Company, in honor of Burroughs,
who died in 1898. Burroughs grew into the biggest adding machine
company in America, although by the 1950s it was selling more
than the basic adding machines, including typewriters and
computers.
The Company developed a range of adding machines with different
capabilities and created the office accounting machine range that
began with the Sensimatic, which had a moving programable
carriage to maintain ledgers. It could store 9, 18 or 27 balances
during the ledger posting operations and worked with a
mechanical adder named a Crossfooter. The Sensimatic developed
into the Sensitronic which could store balances on a magnetic
stripe which was part of the ledger card. This balance was read
into the accumulator when the card was inserted into the carriage.
The Sensitronic was followed by the E1000, the E2000, E4000,
E6000 and the E8000 which was computer system supporting
magnetic tape, card reader/punches and a line printer.
In the late 1960s the D2000, D4000 range was produced - also
known as the TC500 (Terminal Computer 500) which had a golf
ball printer and a 1K (80 bit) disk memory. These were popular as
branch terminals to the B5500/6500/6700 Systems, which sold
well in the Banking Sector.
In 1953 the Burroughs Adding Machine Company was renamed the
Burroughs Corporation and began moving into computer products,
initially for banking institutions. This move began with the purchase
in June 1956, of The ElectroData Corporation in Pasadena,
California, originally a division of Consolidated Electrodynamics
Corporation, but which had been spun off. ElectroData had built
the Datatron 205 and was working on the Datatron 220. The first
major computer product that came from this marriage was the
B205 Tube computer.
The Burroughs Corporation developed three highly innovative
architectures, based on the design philosophy of "language
directed design". Their machine instruction sets favored one or
many high level programming languages, such as ALGOL, COBOL
or FORTRAN. All three architectures were considered "main-
frame" class machines:
The Burroughs large systems machines starting with the B5000 in
1961 were stack machines designed to be programmed in an
extended Algol 60. Their operating systems, called MCP (Master
Control Program - the name later borrowed by the screenwriters
for Tron), were programmed in ESPOL (Executive Systems
Programming Oriented Language, a minor extension of Algol)
almost a decade before Unix, and the command interface
developed into a compiled structured language with procedures
called WFL (Work Flow Language).
Burroughs produced the B2000 or "medium systems" computers
aimed primarily at the business world. The machines were
architected to execute COBOL efficiently. This included a BCD
Binary Coded Decimal based arithmetic unit, storing and
addressing the main memory using Base 10 numbering instead of
binary.
Burroughs produced the B1700 or "small systems" computers that
were designed to be microprogrammed, with each process
potentially getting its own virtual machine designed to be the best
match to the programming language chosen for the application
being run.
The smallest general-purpose computers were the
B700 "microprocessors" which were used both as stand-alone
systems and as special-purpose data-communications or disk-
subsystem controllers.
Burroughs also manufactured an extensive range of accounting
machines including both stand-alone systems such as the
Sensimatic, L500 and B80, and dedicated terminals including the
TC500 and specialised cheque processing equipment.
In the early 1980s Burroughs began producing personal
computers, the B20 and B25 lines. These ran the BTOS operating
system, which Burroughs licensed from Convergent Technologies.
Burroughs financed early work on Wafer-scale integration, but
abandoned this at about the time of the merger with Sperry.
Ivor Catt attempted to continue this in conjunction with Sir Clive
Sinclair, its ultimate demise was caused by reduction in
conventional chip prices.
Burroughs also made military computers, such as the D825, in its
Great Valley Laboratory in Paoli, Pennsylvania. The D825 was,
according to some scholars, the first true multiprocessor computer.
Burroughs Corporation was always a distant second to IBM
commercially if not technologically. At the same time, Burroughs
was very much a competitor and just like IBM, Burroughs tried to
supply a complete answer for its customers. This included
providing Burroughs-designed printers, disk drives, tape drives,
etc., and even computer paper.
Burroughs was one of the eight major United States computer
companies (with IBM, the largest, Honeywell, NCR Corporation,
Control Data Corporation, General Electric, RCA and UNIVAC)
through most of the 1960s. IBM's share of the market at the time
was so much larger than all of the others, that this group was
often sarcastically referred to as "IBM and the Seven Dwarfs."
Later, this group became known as the BUNCH - (Burroughs,
UNIVAC, NCR Corporation, Control Data Corporation, and
Honeywell)
In September 1986, Burroughs Corporation merged with Sperry
Corporation to form Unisys
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