Home > Burroughs

The Burroughs Corporation began in 1886 as the American Arithmometer Company in St. Louis selling an adding machine invented by William Seward Burroughs.

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.

The Burroughs Corporation developed at least two highly innovative architectures:

• The "Burroughs large systems" machines starting with the B5000 in 1961 were stack machines designed to be programmed in an extended Algol 60. Their operating systemIn computing, an operating system OS is the system software responsible for the direct control and management of hardware and basic system operations, as well as running application software such as word processing programs and web browsers. In general, ts, called MCP (Master Control Program - the name later borrowed by the screenwriters for Tron), were programmed in ESPOLESPOL (short for E xecutive S ystems P rogramming O riented L anguage) was a compiler for an ALGOL 60 superset that provided capabilities of that would later be known as Mohols, machine oriented high order languages such as interrupting a processor on a m (Executive Systems Programming Oriented Language, a minor extension of Algol) almost a decade before UnixUNIX (or Unix is a portable, multi-task and multi-user computer operating system originally developed by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy. Unices The term Unices includes Unix and Unix-like ope, and the command interface developed into a compiled structured language with procedures called WFL (Work Flow Language).
• Burroughs produced a series of minicomputerMinicomputer is a largely obsolete term for a class of multi-user computers which make up the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems ( mainframe computers) and the smallest single-user systems ( microcomputers ors starting with the B1700 that were designed to be microprogrammed, with each process potentially getting its own virtual machineIn general terms, a virtual machine in computer science is software that creates an environment between the computer platform and the end user in which the end user can operate software. Specifically, the term virtual machine has several distinct meanings designed to be the best match to the programming languageAn alternate rewrite has been has been. Please refer to it for large rewrites. A programming language or computer language is a standardized communication technique for expressing instructions to a computer. It is a set of syntactic and semantic rules use chosen for the application being run.

Burroughs Corporation was always a distant second to IBM commercially if not technologically. In September 1986, Burroughs Corporation merged with Sperry Rand to form Unisys Corporation.