Burroughs Corporation
More info
- Creator
- William Seward Burroughs
- Released
- 1886–1986
- Type
- Office machines, mainframes
- Successor
- Unisys
Detroit adding-machine maker that built the most forward-looking mainframe of the 1960s and ended up merged into Unisys.
The company began as the American Arithmometer Company in St. Louis, selling the Burroughs adding machine, moved to Detroit, and took the name Burroughs Corporation in 1953. Computers were a short step from there, and Burroughs became one of the BUNCH, the five firms scrapping for whatever IBM left on the table.
Its best-known machine is the B5000 of 1961, designed around high-level languages rather than assembly: a stack machine tuned for ALGOL, with tagged memory, descriptors and virtual memory before most people knew what that was. Its operating system, MCP, was written in an ALGOL dialect, and the architecture still lives on in Unisys ClearPath. In 1986 Burroughs took over Sperry in a hostile bid, and the merged company was renamed Unisys.