Burroughs Corporation

Burroughs Corporation

Formerly	American Arithmometer Company (1886–1904) Burroughs Adding Machine Company (1904–1953)
Industry	Business equipment Adding machines Mainframe computers
Founded	1886; 138 years ago (1886)
Founder	William Seward Burroughs I
Defunct	1986; 38 years ago (1986)
Fate	Merged with the Sperry Corporation
Successor	Unisys
Headquarters	St. Louis, Missouri, United States

The Burroughs Corporation was a major American manufacturer of business equipment. The company was founded in 1886 as the American Arithmometer Company by William Seward Burroughs. In 1986, it merged with Sperry UNIVAC to form Unisys. The company's history paralleled many of the major developments in computing. At its start, it produced mechanical adding machines, and later moved into programmable ledgers and then computers. It was one of the largest producers of mainframe computers in the world, also producing related equipment including typewriters and printers.

Early history

In 1886, the American Arithmometer Company was established in St. Louis, Missouri, to produce and sell an adding machine invented by William Seward Burroughs (grandfather of Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs). In 1904, six years after Burroughs' death, the company moved to Detroit and changed its name to the Burroughs Adding Machine Company. It was soon the biggest adding machine company in America.^[1]

Evolving product lines

The adding machine range began with the basic, hand-cranked Class 1 which was only capable of adding.^{[citation needed][2]} The design included some revolutionary features, foremost of which was the dashpot which governed the speed at which the operating lever could be pulled so allowing the mechanism to operate consistently correctly.^[3] The machine also had a full-keyboard with a separate column of keys 1 to 9 for each decade where the keys latch when pressed, with interlocking which prevented more than one key in any decade from being latched. The latching allowed the operator to quickly check that the correct number had been entered before pulling the operating lever. The numbers entered and the final total were printed on a roll of paper at the rear, so there was no danger of the operator writing down the wrong answer and there was a copy of the calculation which could be checked later if necessary.

The Class 2 machine, called the "duplex" and built in the same basic style, provided a means of keeping two separate totals. The Class 6 machine was built for bookkeeping work and provided the ability for direct subtraction.

Burroughs released the Class 3 and Class 4 adding machines which were built after the purchase of the Pike Adding Machine Company around 1910. These machines provided a significant improvement over the older models because operators could view the printing on the paper tape. The machines were called "the visible" for this improvement.

In 1925 Burroughs released a much smaller machine called "the portable". Two models were released, the Class 8 (without subtraction) and the Class 9 with subtraction capability. Later models continued to be released with the P600 and top-of-the-range P612 offered some limited programmability based upon the position of the movable carriage. The range was further extended by the inclusion of the Series J ten-key machines which provided a single finger calculation facility, and the Class 5 (later called Series C) key-driven calculators in both manual and electrical assisted modelscomptometers.

In the late 1960s, the Burroughs sponsored

• The
  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) and DCALGOL (Data Communications ALGOL) and later in NEWP (with further extensions to ALGOL) almost a decade before Unix. The command interface developed into a compiled structured language with declarations, statements and procedures called WFL (Work Flow Language
  ).

• Burroughs produced the
  binary
  . The designation for these systems was Burroughs B2500 through B49xx, followed by Unisys V-Series V340 through V560.
• Burroughs produced the
  microprogrammed, with each process potentially getting its own virtual machine designed to be the best match to the programming language
  chosen for the program being run.
• The smallest general-purpose computers were the B700 "microprocessors" which were used both as stand-alone systems and as special-purpose data-communications or disk-subsystem controllers.
• Burroughs manufactured an extensive range of
  Sensimatic, L500 and B80 and dedicated terminals including the TC500 and specialised check processing equipment.^[7]
• In 1982, Burroughs began producing
  hard disk between workgroup users. These microcomputers were later manufactured in Kunming, China for use in China under agreement with Burroughs.^[9]
• Burroughs collaborated with
  University of Illinois on a multiprocessor architecture developing the ILLIAC IV
  computer in the early 1960s. The ILLIAC had up to 128 parallel processors while the B6700 & B7700 only accommodated a total of 7 CPUs and/or I/O units (the 8th unit was the memory tester).
• Burroughs made military computers, such as the D825 (the "D" prefix signifying it was for defense industrial use), in its Great Valley Laboratory in Paoli, Pennsylvania.^[10][11] The D825 was, according to some scholars, the first true multiprocessor computer.^[12] Paoli was also home to the Defense and Space Group Marketing Division.^[13]
• In 1964 Burroughs had completed the D830 which was another variation of the D825 designed specifically for real-time applications, such as airline reservations. Burroughs designated the B8300 after Trans World Airlines (TWA) ordered one in September 1965. A system with three instruction processors was installed at TWA's reservations center in Rockleigh, New Jersey in 1968. The system, which was called George, with an application programmed in JOVIAL, was intended to support some 4000 terminals, but the system experienced repeated crashes due to a filing system disk allocation error when operating under a large load. A fourth processor was added but did nothing to resolve the problem. The problem was resolved in late 1970 and the system became stable. The decision to cancel the project was being made at the very time that the problem was resolved. TWA cancelled the project and acquired one IBM System/360 Model 75, two IBM System/360 model 65s, and IBM's PARS software for its reservations system. TWA sued Burroughs for non-fulfillment of the contract, but Burroughs counter-sued, stating that the basic system did work and that the problems were in TWA's applications software. The two companies reached an out-of-court settlement.^[14]
• Burroughs developed a half-size version of the D825 called the D82, cutting the word size from 48 to 24 bits and simplifying the computer's instruction set. The D82 could have up to 32,768 words of core memory and continued the use of separate instruction and I/O processors. Burroughs sold a D82 to
  1a missile systems.^[14][15]

Logo of Burroughs Corporation shortly before their merger with Sperry

In September 1986, Burroughs Corporation merged with Sperry Corporation to form Unisys. For a time, the combined company retained the Burroughs processors as the A- and V-systems lines. As the market for large systems shifted from proprietary architectures to common servers, the company eventually dropped the V-Series line, although customers continued to use V-series systems as of 2010^[update]. As of 2017^[update] Unisys continues to develop and market the A-Series, now known as ClearPath.^[16]

Burroughs Payment Systems

In 2010, Unisys sold off its Payment Systems Division to Marlin Equity Partners, a California-based private investment firm, which incorporated it as Burroughs Payment Systems, Inc. (later just Burroughs, Inc.), based in Plymouth, Michigan.^[17][18]

References in popular culture

Burroughs B205 hardware has appeared as props in many Hollywood television and film productions from the late 1950s. For example, a B205 console was often shown in the television series Batman as the Bat Computer; also as the flight computer in Lost in Space. B205 tape drives were often seen in series such as The Time Tunnel and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.^[19][20]

References

Further reading

• Allweiss, Jack A., "Evolution of Burroughs Stack Architecture - Mainframe Computers", 2010
• Barton, Robert S. "A New Approach to the Functional Design of a Digital Computer" Proc. western joint computer Conf. ACM (1961).
• Gray, George (March 1999). "Some Burroughs Transistor Computers". Unisys History Newsletter. 3 (1). Archived from the original on October 1, 2016.
• Gray, George (October 1999). "Burroughs Third-Generation Computers". Unisys History Newsletter. 3 (5). Archived from the original on September 26, 2017.
• Hauck, E.A., Dent, Ben A. "Burroughs B6500/B7500 Stack Mechanism", SJCC (1968) pp. 245–251.
• Martin, Ian L. (2012) "Too far ahead of its time: Barclays, Burroughs and real-time banking", IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 34(2), pp. 5–19.
  ISSN 1058-6180
  . (Draft version)
• Mayer, Alastair J.W., "The Architecture of the Burroughs B5000 - 20 Years Later and Still Ahead of the Times?", ACM Computer Architecture News, 1982 (archived at the Southwest Museum of Engineering, Communications and Computation. Glendale, Arizona)
• McKeeman, William M. "Language Directed Computer Design", FJCC (1967) pp. 413–417.
• Morgan, Bryan, "Total to Date: The Evolution of the Adding Machine: The Story of Burroughs", Burroughs Adding Machine Limited London, 1953.
• 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).
• Wilner, Wayne T., "B1700 Design and Implementation", Burroughs Corporation, Santa Barbara Plant, Goleta, California, May 1972.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Burroughs Corporation.

• Burroughs Corporation Records
  Unisys Corporation
  in 1986.
• Burroughs Corporation Photo Database at the
  Charles Babbage Institute
  University of Minnesota. The searchable photo database permits browsing and retrieval of over 550 historical images.
• "Burroughs B 5000 Conference, OH 98", Oral history on 6 September 1985, Marina del Ray, California.
  Charles Babbage Institute
  , University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. The Burroughs 5000 computer series is discussed by individuals responsible for its development and marketing from 1957 through the 1960s in a 1985 conference sponsored by AFIPS and Burroughs Corporation.
• Oral history interview with Isaac Levin Auerbach
  Atlas missile
  .
• Oral history interview with Robert V. D. Campbell. Discusses his work at Burroughs (1949–1966) as director of research and in program planning.
• Oral history interview with Alfred Doughty Cavanaugh Cavanaugh discusses the work of his grandfather, A. J. Doughty, with William Seward Burroughs and the Burroughs Adding Machine Company.
• Oral history interview with Carel Sellenraad
  Charles Babbage Institute
  University of Minnesota. Sellenraad describes his long association with Burroughs Adding Machine Company, and the impact of World Wars I & II on the sales and service of calculators, and adding and bookkeeping machines in Europe.
• Oral history interview with Ovid M. Smith
  Charles Babbage Institute
  University of Minnesota. Smith reviews his 46½ year career at Burroughs Adding Machine Company (later Burroughs Corporation).
• "Early Burroughs Machines", University of Virginia's Computer Museum.
• Older Burroughs computer manuals online
• Burroughs computers such as the D825 at BRL
• An historical Burroughs Adding Machine Company/Burroughs site
• Unofficial list of Burroughs manufacturing plants and labs
• Ian Joyner's Burroughs page
• The Burroughs B5900 and E-Mode: A bridge to 21st Century Computing - Jack Allweiss