"Burroughs".
Related Topics:The company moved to Detroit in 1904 and changed its name to the Burroughs Adding Machine Company, in honor of Burroughs, who died in 1898. Burroughs grew into the biggest adding machine company in America, although by the 1950s it was selling more than the basic adding machines, including typewriters and computers.
In 1953 the Burroughs Adding Machine Company was renamed the Burroughs Corporation and began moving into computer products, initially for banking institutions. This move began with the purchase in June, 1956, of The ElectroData Corporation in Pasadena, California. It had originally been a division Consolidated Electrodynamics Corporation, and spun off. ElectroData had built the Datatron 205 and was working on the Datatron 220. The first major computer product that came from this marriage was the B205 Tube computer.
The Burroughs Corporation developed three highly innovative architectures, based on the design philosophy of "language directed design". Their machine instruction sets favored one or many high level programming languages, such as ALGOL, COBOL or FORTRAN. All three architectures were considered "main-frame" class machines:
Burroughs also made military computers, such as the D825, in its Great Valley Laboratory in Paoli, Pennsylvania. The D825 was, according to some scholars, the first true multiprocessor computer.
Burroughs Corporation was always a distant second to IBM commercially if not technologically. At the same time, Burroughs was very much a competitor and just like IBM, Burroughs tried to supply a complete answer for its customers. This included providing Burroughs-designed printers, disk drives, tape drives, etc., and even computer paper.
Burroughs was one of the eight major United States computer companies (with IBM, the largest, Honeywell, NCR Corporation, Control Data Corporation, General Electric, RCA and UNIVAC) through most of the 1960s. IBM's share of the market at the time was so much larger than all of the others, that this group was often sarcastically referred to as "IBM and the Seven Dwarfs."
Later, this group became known as the BUNCH - (Burroughs, UNIVAC, NCR Corporation, Control Data Corporation, and Honeywell)
In September 1986, Burroughs Corporation merged with Sperry Corporation to form Unisys Corporation.
Defunct computer companies of the United States | 1886 establishments | 1986 disestablishments
Burroughs | Burroughs Corporation | Burroughs Corporation | バローズ | Burroughs | Burroughs
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the "Burroughs".
Home Page • arts • business • computers • games • health • hospitals • home • kids & teens • news • physicians • recreation• reference • regional • science • shopping • society • sports • world