Burroughs

Burroughs began as an early manufacturer of computers; some of their initial machines were responsible for notable advances in the field of computers.

Like their competitors International Business Machines and Remington Rand, it was originally a business machine manufacturer, dating back to the pre-electronic era. It was founded by William S. Burroughs in 1885, as American Arithmometer Corporation, to produce mechanical digital calculating machines. Again like its competitors, it expanded into tabulating machines, for us in processing data in business applications (although unlike IBM and Remington Rand, Burroughs did not get into punched cards).

After WWII, looking to get into new business areas, Burroughs started a research facility to investigate electronic computers. That Burroughs Research Center was initially set up just after 1949 in Philadelphia (ironically, in the building that had once held the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation), and later moved to Paoli.

Burroughs' first computer was the Unitized Digital Electronic Computer, of which two were produced, starting in February, 1951. In May, 1956 it acquired Electrodata (a one-time division of Consolidated Enginering Corporation), in Pasadena, California, to expand its product line. The Burroughs 220, still a vacuum tube machine, came out in 1957; a first transistor computer, the AN/GSQ-33, also appeared in 1957, but it was a military machine, not for open sale.

Burroughs B5000 and successors

Burroughs made a very large impact with its Burroughs B5000, an influential early mainframe computer, in 1961. As Burroughs' first internally-developed machine, they sought to try and catch up to their (by then) well-established 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; that was connected to its support of ALGOL (COBOL was also provided). 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.

Finale

Burroughs bought Sperry Rand in 1986, and merged the two into Unisys.

Further reading

• George T. Gray, Ronald Q. Smith, Unisys Computers: An Introductory History, 2008 - a good amount of Burroughs content
• James W. Cortada, Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, and Remington Rand and the Industry They Created, 1865-1956, Princeton University, Princeton, 1993
• Elliott I. Organick, Computer System Organization: The B5700/B6700 Series, Academic, New York, 1973

External links

• unisys - documentation at Bitsavers
  • The Products of Burroughs (1966)
  • Burroughs in California
• Burroughs Corporation records
  • Burroughs Corporation Digital Photographs and Videos
• Unisys History Newsletter - mostly Burroughs and Sperry Rand (UNIVAC) content - archived here