Burroughs Corporation

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The Burroughs Corporation began in 1886 as the American Arithmometer Company in St. Louis, Missouri selling an adding machine invented by William Seward Burroughs.

A Burroughs Class 1/Model 9 adding machine.

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.

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. It had originally been a division Consolidated Electrodynamics Corporation, and 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.

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.^[1]

Burroughs B25 model (Convergent Technologies NGEN)

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.

1 References in popular culture
2 Notes
3 References
4 External links

[edit] References in popular culture

Burroughs B205 hardware has appeared as props in many Hollywood TV and movie productions from the 1960s onwards. For example a B205 console was often shown in the TV series Batman as the Bat Computer; also as the computer in Lost in Space. B205 tape drives were often seen in shows such as The Time Tunnel and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

[edit] Notes

^ Enslow, Philip H., Jr., "Multiprocessor Organization - A Survey", Computing Surveys, Vol. 9, March 1977, pp.103-129.

[edit] References

Barton, Robert S. "A New Approach to the Functional Design of a Digital Computer" Proc. western joint computer Conf. ACM (1961).
Gray, George. "Some Burroughs Transistor Computers", Unisys History Newsletter, Volume 3, Number 1, March 1999.[1]
Gray, George. "Burroughs Third-Generation Computers, Unisys History Newsletter, Volume 3, Number 5, October 1999. [2]
Hauck, E.A., Dent, Ben A. "Burroughs B6500/B7500 Stack Mechanism", SJCC (1968) pp. 245-251.
McKeeman, William M. "Language Directed Computer Design", FJCC (1967) pp. 413-417.
Organick, Elliot I. "Computer System Organization The B5700/B6700 series", Academic Press (1973)
Wilner, Wayne T. "Design of the B1700", FJCC pp. 489-497 (1972).