Unisys
More info
- Released
- 1986
- Type
- IT services, mainframes
The merger of two mainframe pioneers, remembered mostly for making the web switch image formats.
Burroughs bought Sperry in 1986, and the combined company was named Unisys after an employee naming contest. It merged two lineages: Burroughs, which began with adding machines, and Sperry, which owned UNIVAC. For a while Unisys was the second-largest computer company in the world. Both hardware lines survive in the ClearPath mainframes, which these days mostly run as emulation on x86.
Sperry also brought along the patent on LZW compression. When Unisys started demanding licence fees for GIF software around the turn of 1994–95, developers created PNG in protest. The US patent expired in 2003, by which point PNG had taken over everything except the animations.