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. 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.
In the 1960s, the company introduced a range of mainframe computers that were well regarded for their performance running high-level languages. These formed the core of the company's business into the 1970s. At that time the emergence of superminicomputers and the dominance of the IBM System/360 and 370 at the high end led to shrinking markets, and in 1986 the company purchased former competitor Sperry UNIVAC and merged their operations to form Unisys.
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's 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.[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.
Move into computers
The biggest shift in company history came in 1953: the Burroughs Adding Machine Company was renamed the Burroughs Corporation and began moving into digital computer products, initially for banking institutions. This move began with Burroughs's purchase in June 1956, of the ElectroData Corporation in Pasadena, California, a spinoff of the Consolidated Engineering Corporation which had designed test instruments and had a cooperative relationship with Caltech in Pasadena.[4] ElectroData had built the Datatron 205 and was working on the Datatron 220.[4] The first major computer product that came from this marriage was the B205 tube computer. In 1968[5] the L and TC series range was produced (e.g. the TC500—Terminal Computer 500) which had a golf ball printer and in the beginning a 1K (64 bit) disk memory. These were popular as branch terminals to the B5500/6500/6700 systems, and sold well in the banking sector, where they were often connected to non-Burroughs mainframes. In conjunction with these products, Burroughs also manufactured an extensive range of cheque processing equipment, normally attached as terminals to a medium systems such as B200/B300 and larger systems such as a B2700 or
A force in the computing industry
Burroughs was one of the nine major United States computer companies in the 1960s, with IBM the largest, Honeywell, NCR Corporation, Control Data Corporation (CDC), General Electric (GE), Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), RCA and Sperry Rand (UNIVAC line). In terms of sales, Burroughs was always a distant second to IBM. In fact, IBM's market share was so much larger than all of the others that this group was often referred to as "IBM and the Seven Dwarves."[6] By 1972 when GE and RCA were no longer in the mainframe business, the remaining five companies behind IBM became known as the BUNCH, an acronym based on their initials.
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. As of 2017 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] Burroughs equipment was also featured in the movie The Angry Red Planet.[21]
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).
- 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. . (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.
External links
- Burroughs Corporation Records Charles Babbage Institute University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Collection contains the records of the Burroughs Corporation, and its predecessors the American Arithmometer Company and Burroughs Adding Machine Company. Materials include corporate records, photographs, films and video tapes, scrapbooks, papers of employees and the records of companies acquired by Burroughs. CBI's Burroughs Corporation Records includes over 100,000 photographs depicting the entire visual history of Burroughs from its origin as the American Arithmometer Corporation in 1886 to its merger with the Sperry Corporation to form the 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
References
- Burroughs Adding Machine retrieved 18 May 2020^
- Burroughs Vintage Calculators Web Museum, retrieved 18 May 2020^
- Bryan Morgan. Total to Date: The Evolution of the Adding Machine: The Story of Burroughs Burroughs Adding Machine Limited London, 1953^