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LETS BEGIN IN 2010

This one hits a little too close to home.

I was on the design team for the B6800, B6900, B5900 and the A3/A9.

Found this image of A Burroughs B5000/5500. Can you imagine the electric bill!

Burroughs large systems

What is it like to work with one of those behemoths?

Depends on the site.

I worked at the Large Systems plant in Mission Viejo, CA. It's still a Unisys plant, but now all engineering, no manufacturing.

The data processing shop there was closed. You couldn't really even see the computers. There were terminals in various places, but if you needed someone to hang a tape, you submitted the tape with a (paper) request form.

The engineering data center was different. You needed a tape mounted, an operator would teach you how -- once.

For my shift, I had pretty much exclusive access to a B6900, which was for the time a very nice box. It was fully loaded with 1 million words of RAM. A word was 48 bits, so six megabytes (and yes, it was a modern machine, it used RAM, not core). During the day, the entire A3 engineering staff used the same machine.

The B6900 was clocked at six megahertz.

Everything was character mode -- no graphics.

The B-series (and later A-series) machines were optimized for block structured languages like Algol.

The OS was called MCP, and it had multiple interfaces, the most common one was called CANDE (Command AND Edit). Batch jobs were submitted using WFL (Work Flow Language), usually on cards.

The year was 1981.

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One of the last machines I worked on was the A9.



The original design was to use a Burroughs-designed ECL logic family (because it was faster than TTL) called BCML. They switched to standard ECL when the parts came from the fab with 75nsec delays instead of 5nsec delays, proving that BCML did actually stand for "Burroughs Can't Make Logic."

BCML was designed for water cooling, while the off-the-shelf ECL was air cooled.

The original cabinet design was a counter-height so the system console terminal could sit on top (saving space, earlier machines were supplied with a separate table). When they switched to ECL, cold air was to blow in through ducts in the false floor, and up through the cabinet.

The final design reversed the airflow (in at the top, out at the bottom) and replaced the metal cabinet top with wood/formica.

ECL runs very hot, and the original design would have been hot enough to cook an egg.

edit: there is an 8" floppy drive on the front of the system cabinet. That was for the maintenance processor.

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One of the last machines I worked on was the A9.



The original design was to use a Burroughs-designed ECL logic family (because it was faster than TTL) called BCML. They switched to standard ECL when the parts came from the fab with 75nsec delays instead of 5nsec delays, proving that BCML did actually stand for "Burroughs Can't Make Logic."

BCML was designed for water cooling, while the off-the-shelf ECL was air cooled.

The original cabinet design was a counter-height so the system console terminal could sit on top (saving space, earlier machines were supplied with a separate table). When they switched to ECL, cold air was to blow in through ducts in the false floor, and up through the cabinet.

The final design reversed the airflow (in at the top, out at the bottom) and replaced the metal cabinet top with wood/formica.

ECL runs very hot, and the original design would have been hot enough to cook an egg.

edit: there is an 8" floppy drive on the front of the system cabinet. That was for the maintenance processor.

What year was this mainframe in use?

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LETS BEGIN IN 2010

This one hits a little too close to home.

I was on the design team for the B6800, B6900, B5900 and the A3/A9.

Found this image of A Burroughs B5000/5500. Can you imagine the electric bill!

Burroughs large systems

What is it like to work with one of those behemoths?

Depends on the site.

I worked at the Large Systems plant in Mission Viejo, CA. It's still a Unisys plant, but now all engineering, no manufacturing.

The data processing shop there was closed. You couldn't really even see the computers. There were terminals in various places, but if you needed someone to hang a tape, you submitted the tape with a (paper) request form.

The engineering data center was different. You needed a tape mounted, an operator would teach you how -- once.

For my shift, I had pretty much exclusive access to a B6900, which was for the time a very nice box. It was fully loaded with 1 million words of RAM. A word was 48 bits, so six megabytes (and yes, it was a modern machine, it used RAM, not core). During the day, the entire A3 engineering staff used the same machine.

The B6900 was clocked at six megahertz.

Everything was character mode -- no graphics.

The B-series (and later A-series) machines were optimized for block structured languages like Algol.

The OS was called MCP, and it had multiple interfaces, the most common one was called CANDE (Command AND Edit). Batch jobs were submitted using WFL (Work Flow Language), usually on cards.

The year was 1981.

Is the Burroughs Corporation still in business?

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LETS BEGIN IN 2010

Ferranti Pegasus computer. This computer was a classic 1950s/1960s mainframe installation, taking up the majority of space in a room

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LETS BEGIN IN 2010

Ad from Japan

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LETS BEGIN IN 2010

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LETS BEGIN IN 2010

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LETS BEGIN IN 2010

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LETS BEGIN IN 2010

Harvard Mark 1

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LETS BEGIN IN 2010

The famous Univac of Remington

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LETS BEGIN IN 2010

1955 Univac 120 Computer

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LETS BEGIN IN 2010

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LETS BEGIN IN 2010

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LETS BEGIN IN 2010

Is the Burroughs Corporation still in business?

Burroughs and Sperry-Univac merged to become Unisys, and Unisys is still in business. As far as I can tell, you can still buy a computer that is in some ways descended from the B5000.

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Is the Burroughs Corporation still in business?

Burroughs and Sperry-Univac merged to become Unisys, and Unisys is still in business. As far as I can tell, you can still buy a computer that is in some ways descended from the B5000.

what type of businesses use Unisys?

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LETS BEGIN IN 2010

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LETS BEGIN IN 2010

Is the Burroughs Corporation still in business?

Burroughs and Sperry-Univac merged to become Unisys, and Unisys is still in business. As far as I can tell, you can still buy a computer that is in some ways descended from the B5000.

what type of businesses use Unisys?

Beats me. I left somewhere around the time the two merged.

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Is the Burroughs Corporation still in business?

Burroughs and Sperry-Univac merged to become Unisys, and Unisys is still in business. As far as I can tell, you can still buy a computer that is in some ways descended from the B5000.

what type of businesses use Unisys?

Mainframe computing, see the Link here.

the Wiki on Univac wrote:

Since the 1986 marriage of Burroughs and Sperry, Unisys has metamorphosed from a computer manufacturer to a computer services and outsourcing firm, competing in the same marketplace as IBM, Electronic Data Systems (EDS), and Computer Sciences Corporation. Unisys continues to design and manufacture enterprise class computers with the ClearPath and ES7000 server lines.

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's