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Burroughs Corporation Superseded

Burroughs Corporation
KindCompany
Founded1886
Defunct1986
StatusSuperseded
FoundersWilliam Seward Burroughs
FieldBusiness machines
Sourcebitsavers.org ↗

A century of adding machines before computers — then the B5000, the most elegant mainframe architecture of its era. Merged with Sperry to form Unisys.

Succeeded by Unisys
Created Burroughs B5000 Burroughs MCP ILLIAC IV
Notable people Edsger W. Dijkstra

Founded 1886 as the American Arithmometer Company to sell William Burroughs's adding machine, renamed for him in 1905. A century of mechanical calculators preceded the 1961 B5000 — designed around a stack architecture specifically to run ALGOL, with tagged memory and an OS (MCP) written in a high-level language when that was heresy.

Its 1986 merger with Sperry created Unisys. The B5000's descendants still ship as ClearPath MCP — arguably the oldest continuously-architected system line in existence.

Sources

  1. bitsavers.org/pdf/burroughs/
  2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_Corporation