Burroughs Corporation

The Burroughs Corporation was an American office equipment manufacturer.

History

Originally sold the American Arithmometer Company of St. Louis by William Seward Burroughs invented adding machines. After moving to Detroit in 1904 its name was changed after the inventor in Burroughs Adding Machine Company. Burroughs died in 1898. Burroughs became the largest manufacturer of adding machines in the U.S., even typewriters and calculating machines were in the 50s then made ​​.

In 1953, the Burroughs Adding Machine Company was renamed Burroughs Corporation and began after the purchase of ElectoData in Pasadena, California, with manufacturing computers for banks. The first product was the computer B205 Tube. Burroughs had offices in Germany, the Burroughs GmbH worldwide.

Booking and payment processing machines were developed on the basis of mechanical calculating machines in conjunction with electronic circuits that were incorporated at many banks as evidence processing and document processing machines under the name " Sensi Matic " in Germany. A special category were the magnetic accounts accounting machines.

Burroughs developed three highly innovative mainframe computer architectures.

• The Burroughs Large Systems machines with the B5000 (1961 ) were cellar machinery that have been programmed in extended ALGOL 60. Your operating system, the Master Control Program ( MCP) was programmed in ESPOL ( Executive Systems Programming Oriented Language, a slight extension of Algol ), about 10 years before the development of Unix. For the command interface ( Command Interface) existed a structured, compilable language with procedures that WFL ( Work Flow Language) has been called. The control language for the dialog interface was CANDE ( Command-and- edit).
• The Burroughs B2000 (Medium Systems) aimed primarily at the commercial market. They were designed specifically for the execution of COBOL programs. This included a unit of BCD ( Binary Coded Decimal) arithmetic operations for storing and addressing the main memory with base -10 operations rather than binary.
• The Burroughs B1700 ( Small Systems ) were microprogrammed, with each process potentially received its own virtual machine.

The Burroughs Corporation was after the size - although not technologically - always eternal second to IBM. She was in the 60s, one of the eight major computer companies of the United States ( with IBM - the biggest, Honeywell, Scientific Data Systems, Control Data Corporation, General Electric, RCA, and UNIVAC ). Later this group under the name BUNCH ( Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data Corporation, and Honeywell) was known.

In September 1986, the Burroughs Corporation merged with Sperry Corporation under the new name of Unisys Corporation.