Talk:Burroughs Corporation

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[edit] MCP in Tron and the Burroughs MCP

The use of the name "MCP" in Tron may indeed be very related to the Burroughs MCP. I was working in the Burrough's plant in Mission Viejo, California at the time the movie came out. At the time there were also Burroughs plants in Pasedena and Santa Barbara (all not far from Hollywood and Disney). I was told that one of the screenwriters was an ex-Burroughs employee (or a spouse of an employee?).

Don't forget the tape and disk plant in Westlake, California!

[edit] Third computer line

In addition to the two computer lines mentioned on the main page, I believe there was third. The plant in Pasedena, California produced a machine (referred to as "medium systems" in the early 1980's) that stored numbers in BCD notation, which apparently gave an advantage (at one time) in doing business calculations. This may well have originally been a company acquired Burroughs some years before.

All of this could use some verification...

-- PBannister (wikipedia login not working)

The article now mentions that (and has done so for a while, I think). Guy Harris 20:11, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] ElectroData

Could that be "ElectroData" rather than "ElectoData"?

I presume the article said "ElectoData" at one point. That appears to have been fixed at some point. Guy Harris 20:11, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] B80 series

The principles of the B1700 line (a mutable virtual machine by changing the microcode to match the high level language family currently being executed) were driven down to very small machines. The B80 (released ~1975) was a 'single operator' machine with a business role similar to what we now call a PC. The CMS operating system on this 64KByte-RAM machine was recognisably the MCP, providing multitasking and virtual memory. This was achieved by switching the microcode to run a cousin of compiled Algol/C during compiling/utilities/system calls/kernel processing, and again to run compiled COBOL/RPG for business applications. In both cases the 'machine code' run by the 'microcode' would nowadays be considered 'P-code' and 'interpreter' respectively.

[I was the CMS/B80 development manager.] Shannock9 19:36, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

You might want to add that information to the article, rather than the discussion page, or create a new Burroughs B80 page for it. Guy Harris 20:11, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Airline Reservations and TWA project

Burroughs, Systems Development Corporation, and TWA embarked on a project in the late 1960s to build an airline reservation system, running on a high-end Bxxxx computer. This system had two big processors, sharing a very large fixed-head hard disk drive. The application was written in ALGOL, and included development of an underlying real-time transaction processing system as well as a general-purpose database management system. By the early 70's, TWA saw the handwriting on the wall and hired Electronic Data Systems to do a study and predict the system's lifetime (performance vs. capacity). EDS concluded that the system would have a year of operation before it ran out of capacity. Burroughs had no upgrade path from that machine, and EDS recommended going with an IBM S/360 running PARS. The whole reservations operation was relocated from Rockleigh, NJ to Kansas City, and TWA's PARS system was up and running within 12 months on a S/370 Model 75 (primary) and one Model 65(backup and development). The two mainframes shared a bank of Large Core Storage and had switched access to an array of 94 disk drives. TWA filed suit against Burroughs and SDC for $40 million, and they eventually settled out of court. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.129.19.44 (talk) 16:42, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Burroughs attempt at PC market early 1980s

I would say around 1981 Burroughs introduced the ET2000 line of personal computers in response to IBM’s introduction of the PC. The mind set at the time was to make a machine with better performance and capability than the competition. IBM used the Intel 8088 8-bit processor while Burroughs used the 8086 16-bit processor, IBM used a CGA graphics controller and monitor while Burroughs used the EGA graphics controller and monitor.

Fair play, you don't mean EGA you mean "much better resolution than IBM"- which wasn't very difficult.

Another innovation by Burroughs was connecting the floppy drive and later hard drive external to the main processor cabinet (housed in the monitor assemble) using a serial interface allowing storage to be concatenated or daisy chained. This is much like the USB in today’s PCs.

External serial buses were already old hat. I think HP had one for one of their calculators, and much of the early work had been done by J.D.Nicoud at ETH Zurich. Whatever management used to tell us other people were doing clever stuff as well :-)

Capability drove the ET2000 contrasting the low density 360k floppy of IBM with the 400k floppy in the Burroughs machine, likewise the 760k double density floppy of IBM was eclipsed by the 800k Burroughs floppy. These innovations proved to be the demise of the ET2000 in the PC market. Compatibility and not capability were driving the market and the proprietary architecture so prevalent in the mainframe was not the direction for the PC market. To my knowledge the only programs available for use on the ET2000 and it’s modified DOS operating system were WordStar, Visicalc and GraphWriter. ET2000’s were also used as diagnostic and boot processors for the A-Series mainframe systems.

Was that the same equipment that was sold to the banking sector as the Burroughs Modular Terminal with an extensive range of peripherals hooked together by (I think) an RS422 connection? The external connection was its downfall: the designers had specified heavy cable with multiple internal screens, but the "handicap department" had insisted on standard lightweight connectors and hoods at each end. When this was recognised as a problem instead of using decent hoods which would have supported the cable properly a lighter unscreened cable was substituted, with the result that the hardware was excessively sensitive to static electricity.
While discussing almost-PCs don't forget the B20, which was networked at the disc-controller level so that one hard disc could be shared by multiple systems (I don't know whether there was any form of locking). Also don't forget the Redactron.

Other Burroughs innovations in the computer industry were the use of LSI (large scale integrated circuits or “chips”) and VLSI (very large scale integrated circuits),

I don't believe Burroughs had a stranglehold on this. Remember that the B80 CPU was spread over multiple chips at the same time that other processors like the Z80 were in a single 40-pin package.

the concept of DLP (data link processors) separate from the main system processors that controlled peripheral devices such as disk storage, tape and printers,

I've made brief mention of the B700 as a dedicated front-end in various places. I'll try and write a decent article on it at some point.

paged memory or memory paging where memory beyond the 1M word restriction at the time could be bridged by adding additional “memory pages” of 1M words each. Another innovation was the “multiple program” processor which allowed more than one program to be run at the same time using what is called a “look ahead” prom which preconditioned machine states to allow true multi-program operation.

Perhaps you would like to expand on that. I'm having difficulty interpreting it in the context of any particular architecture.
I've started an article "Burroughs Corporation Accounting Machines" with the eventual intention of having something on the B80, L and TC series, and Sensimatic etc. I think it would also be a good place for brief mention of things like cheque sorters, in short anything that isn't one of the mainframe ranges which generally already have their own articles. I've also got a stub for "Burroughs Sensimatic"- any machine that was active for 30 years deserves an article. MarkMLl 21:11, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

[I worked for Burroughs Corp. for a little over 20 years as a systems engineer and manager. I started working with the B80, B90 and B900 before moving on to the large mainframes: B6900, A-Series A15, A17 and A19 - please address any questions or observations to benstrasser@verizon.net]