Burroughs B5000

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The Burroughs B5000 was an influential early (1961) mainframe computer. Since it was Burroughs' first internally-developed machine, they sought to try and catch up to their competitors (such as IBM) by including a number of advanced aspects from the forefront of computer science.

One important novelty was its support of segmentation, which was used to provide virtual memory. It was also heavily stack-oriented at the instruction level.

It supported COBOL and ALGOL, but not (initially) FORTRAN, since ALGOL was viewed as superior. In another influential novelty, its operating system, the Master Control Program, was written in ALGOL, in part since it was intended that the machine need not support being programmed in assembly language.

It was followed by the Burroughs B5500 and Burroughs B5700; re-designs led to the Burroughs B6500 and Burroughs B6700 family.

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