Unisys
Unisys is a computer science service. The company has long been a hardware manufacturer, but has switched the focus to services since 1990.
The company's headquarters is located in Blue Bell (Pennsylvania) in the northeastern United States.
Unisys Corporation has offices in more than 100 countries and employs approximately 26,000 people worldwide.
History
Unisys emerged from a merger of the Sperry Corporation and Burroughs Corporation. The fusion was then known as dinosaur wedding in the computer science industry. Burroughs bought Sperry on 27 May 1986 at a price of 4.8 billion U.S. dollars. The merger of the two companies took place on 16 September 1986. This merger made Unisys the second largest computer science at the time service providers worldwide. The name Unisys (United Information Systems) was found in an in-house competition. The future name " Unisys " for the new company was announced on November 10. The merger was initiated by W. Michael Blumenthal.
The roots of the Unisys go back to 1816 to the Remington Arms Company - E. Remington & Sons, which brought the first commercially viable typewriter ( Remington ) on the market. In 1925 they produced the first electric typewriter. Remington Rand was created in 1927 from the Remington Typewriter Company, Rand Kardex the Company, and the Powers Accounting Machine Company. Among other things, typewriters were produced, which introduced the first QWERTY keyboard. Remington put forth later adding machines. 1950 Remington Rand bought the Eckert - Mauchly Computer Corporation.
The Eckert - Mauchly Computer Corporation, founded by J. Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly, developed one of the first digital computer in the world, the ENIAC. After buying up the ENIAC was developed further with the product lines and UNIVAC UNIVAC I and UNIVAC 1100/2200. In 1952, the UNIVAC wrote history when the computer predicted the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower in the U.S. presidential elections. Eckert remained with Remington Rand, later Sperry and Unisys and held a senior position in the company. 1989 Eckert left Unisys, the company was but continued as a consultant.
Remington Rand was. Due to the acquisition of Engineering Research Associates ( ERA), enhanced by the expertise of drum memory, a precursor of disk storage On this basis, Remington Rand developed the UNIVAC computer series continues. Among other things, Seymour Cray and William C. Norris were involved in the development of the UNIVAC series.
1955 Sperry acquired Remington Rand and the company name into Sperry Rand.
Sperry Rand UNIVAC belonged to the group of those manufacturers who BUNCH ( for Burroughs, Univac, NCR, CDC, Honeywell) in the 1960s and 1970s were under the symbol with mainframe computers in competition with IBM. Were particularly successful UNIVAC computer with air carriers that operate on their accounting systems.
1978 Sperry Rand decided to focus on the business field computers, and sold Remington Rand Systems, Remington Rand Machines, Ford Instrument Company, Sperry Aerospace and Sperry Vickers. The word " edge " was deleted from the name, from now on, the company was again Sperry Corporation. The UNIVAC division was then called Sperry Univac and some time later simply Sperry.
In 1986, Sperry merged with the Burroughs Corporation. The divisions of both companies were united under the name Unisys and abandoned the two traditional names Sperry and Burroughs. The other divisions of Sperry Sperry New Holland, Sperry Gyroscope, Sperry Vickers, Sperry Marine and Sperry Flight Systems were sold after the merger.
In 1953 Burroughs, after buying the 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.
In 1961 Burroughs the first computer before, which had a virtual memory, as well as a dual processor, the B5000. The Burroughs B5000 provided an alternative to the published in 1964 by IBM S/360 dar. Furthermore, Burroughs developed with the B1700 a series of minicomputers, who possessed each process has its own virtual machine.
Larry Wall was employed as an administrator and programmer at the company Unisys, where he was involved since March 1987 are working to develop under the code name blacker a secure network for the NSA. He received several orders to create tools for remote maintenance and monitoring of the resulting software. A major task was to produce clear reports of scattered log files. As the existing languages and tools for this seemed too cumbersome, he developed with the help of his former team-mate Daniel Faigin and his brother Mark Biggar gradually the Perl programming language to solve its tasks.
1988 Unisys bought Convergent Technologies and took over the CTOS operating system.
1990 accession to the X / Open
1994 The GIF patent
2004 Unisys joins the Linux Foundation.
2005 Unisys and NEC Corporation agree in the areas of server technology, research & development and manufacturing of a partnership for the production of Intel-based high performance computers.
2006 Unisys has sold its media division for $ 50 million in Atex. Likewise, it sold all of the shares of the Japanese subsidiary Nihon Unisys.
2007 Unisys ported the OS2200 ( UNIVAC ) operating system, which was based previously on custom-built specific processors on Intel Xeon processors.
Business
Unisys has evolved from a long-established hardware manufacturer to a service provider. Even today, mainframe computers and high performance computers are sold, the revenue but are generated mainly by services and software.
Services
- Enterprise Security - Security solutions in all areas.
- Outsourcing - Process and IT Outsourcing
- Real Time Infrastructures - solutions in logistics and travel
- Open Source - solutions based on a defined open source stack
- Microsoft Solutions - Solutions in the Microsoft environment
- 3D Blueprinting - business consulting
Products
- Software - General application software in the areas of finance, aviation, logistics and security.
- Enterprise Server - Intel -based high-performance servers, ES7000
- Mainframes - Unisys ClearPath mainframe -based, MCP ( Bouroughs ) and OS2200 ( UNIVAC ) compatible
Industries
- Public Sector - Offers for agencies, judicial and administrative bodies.
- Financial Services - Offers for banks and insurance companies.
- Communications - Offers for communications industry.
- Transportation - Offers for airports, air traffic control and logistics companies.
- Consumer & Industrial Products - Offers for retail and consumer products, industrial and life science.
Specific products
Unisys developed NEXRAD ( next generation radar ). That based on the Doppler effect radar NEXRAD to warn airport and pilots from sudden gusts and a downburst. All airports in the U.S. are equipped with this system. Unisys offers at the business unit on Transportation Weather data and uplink capacity to satellites of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Controversial
Some people know by the Unisys patent application (U.S. Patent 4,558,302 ) of the LZW compression algorithm, which was used primarily by graphics format GIF. End of 1994, Unisys announced together with CompuServe that they want to enforce the patent on this compression method the GIF images. This not only led to an outcry in the computer science community, but also to the development of the PNG image format. The patent for the LZW compression algorithm which expired in 2003 in the U.S., 2004 in Europe and Asia.
Unisys has been the target of an anti - corruption campaign in the defense sector in 1991, which was held under the code name "Operation Ill Wind ". Unisys was sentenced to a heavy fine for taking bribes of more than $ 163 million plus costs.