1969 Burroughs B6500 Computer Vintage Mainframe History (UNISYS, Data Processing, Pasadena))
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 ก.ค. 2016
- A vintage 1969 Burroughs Corporation briefing on the status of the B6500 Electronic Data Processing System. With very minor restorations, this clip provides a historical view of this early machine's creation. Burroughs Corporation was merged with Sperry Corporation in 1986 to form Unisys Corporation. Information courtesy of Unisys Archives, Charles Babbage Institute, and Bitsavers.org. Provided for non-commercial use only. Educational reference material. Runtime: 13 mins.
Published with permission under the Creative Commons License:
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The B6500 was a successor to the B5500 Computer, and was upgraded to the B6700 Computer in the field. We hope you enjoy this brief walk down "memory lane" during the highly competitive mainframe computer marketplace of the mid 1960's.]
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I was a B3500 computer operator during the early 1970s for the USAF. The Burroughs MCP allowed for most jobs to started with ONE control card. The computer could run a variable number of variable sized programs at once. In later years, I was amazed to see how primitive IBM computers were with the baroque JCL system.
Me too (AFSC 511X0) Plattsburgh AFB 73-78, instructor at Sheppard 78-79. Loved working with the B3X00 system.
MCP has a great entry on Wikipedia. Amazing amount of details. Knuth as a student intern made it possible. It is still in use.
No need to remind me what a delight it was to work with Burroughs Large Systems all those decades ago. I applied for a job with the organisation because I had read about Burroughs machines when I took a course about operating systems. No disappointments on that account.
I worked for Burroughs from 1965 thru 1970 as a computer engineer. At the conclusion of one training mission at the Mission Viejo plant in 1969 the manager offered me a slightly damaged 39 inch storage disk as a souvenir. I happily accepted and used it as a tabletop. It has been the subject of many interesting conversation in the past five decades.
Sounds like a great souvenir! I bet very few are left, outside of museums. Thanks for the comments!
@@ComputerHistoryArchivesProject The hard drive's bronze hub weighed 20bs. Of high-grade bronze alloy. Salvage yards might kill for that quantity.
I so wish I had grabbed one when I had a chance!
Can anyone confirm the story about the "C72" protective coating on the surface of the disks? I began my career as a Burroughs Field Engineer in 1973. In asking another FE about the C72 coating, I was told that in 1971 there were so many hard disk crashes resulting in many unit replacements that the exec's told the design engineers, "You'd better come up with a fix, and fast, or you won't see 1972 with this company!" The result was the C72 coating that sort of cushioned the blow if the heads touched the disk, avoiding catastrophic crashes. So, the name was basically a pun. See '72.
@@stevenemert837 I operated a "B800" (1978?) in the early 80s. Great machine, but the hard disk crashes were still very common. I always had a bad feeling opening the office door in the morning. You could hear the scratching noises, when the head hit the disk again from far. It happend about 5 times each year... that and the maintenance costs later caused us to switch to a much smaller Data General.
MCP, Algol... I mastered those in the long past ago... It was up to date with B6700/7700 up to end of 1970s and the first years of 1980s... The greatest computer architecture even created.
So true. Was way ahead of its time.
One of the coolest things I remember about the 6700/7700 systems happened during our transition between those two. The 6700 was production, and the new 7700 had just finished installation and testing. We shut them both down, then swapped the disk cables between the two. Hit the "Halt" and "Load" switches - or as we called it "mash the buttons" both systems booted right back up, only now the 7700 was production and the 6700 was test. No muss, no fuss.... although the customer did recompile some stuff to optimize performance a while later. .
I sent this video to my dad, who worked at Burroughs, and he sent me this:
"This was really fun to watch. This was the state-of-the-art when I first began working as a co-op technician for Burroughs in Plymouth, Michigan. However, I worked on what they then called Terminal Computers, essentially for things like a bank teller machine. It was really a hybrid with lots of mechanical and electromechanical parts, like the keyboard, the paper tape reader to store programs and data (think eight bit rows on a tape with a punch being a 1 and no punch being a zero) and a Selectric “golf ball” printing head. The integrated circuits used for logic and limited digital memory had about 100 transistors. One job I had was laying out the circuits to be etched on the printed circuit boards shown in the movie."
In 1971, he worked at Datapoint and had a Datapoint 2200 at home as part of his technical support job. He also worked at Sycor in Ann Arbor from 1974 to 1978, and one of his big projects there was creating a custom version of the Sycor 440 for Yellow Freight Truck Line in Kansas City:
"We put them in their freight terminals to automate the creation and communication of Freight Bills. I wrote much of the application programming and traveled to KC and several of their freight terminals to install and test it. I carried a beeper to respond to technical support issues. I had many interesting experiences with that project and in KC."
Hi Jonathan, thank you very much for sharing your dad's comments on the Burroughs film! It sounds like he had quite a fascinating time working with these early machines back in the 1970's. It is great to hear some of the first-hand experiences like his, which many people today do not know about. Glad you found this interesting too. Hope you can explore some of our other films as well. Thank you again for sharing this! ~ Victor, at CHAP
When I was in high school, we had a mod33 TTY connected to a b5500 timesharing system. fun stuff. After college, I got a job with Burroughs as a field service engineer. I installed and repaired a 6700 system.... also fun stuff.
Hi Jim, Thanks for sharing that. From what I have seen, the 6700 was a beast. I can imagine it was fun to work on too.
Victor, CHAP.
@@ComputerHistoryArchivesProject The 6700 was a large mainframe if you had it fully configured. You could put three cpus and 2 i/o modules, 6MB memory (cores), and cabinets for the I/O interfaces. Terminals ran off sub processors called DCPs. Probably used enough power for a couple suburban houses.
That's cool. How long did you work for Burroughs ?
@@fridaynighthikes 11 years
I used to be an operator for a B500 banking system and later an operator for a B3500 computer. Alas there is virtually no footage available for for the B500 machine. It was my favorite small machine. I keep looking though.
Thanks for the footage.
David, thanks very much. Hopefully, some B500 footage will show up. Thanks for the info! ~ Vincent, CHAP
"ESPOL"? Hmmm... that's a new one to me.
LOVE these historical films- I was in third grade when this one was produced. Thank you for posting these!!
You are very welcome! ~ Victor
I was a hardware guy, but I believe "ESPOL" was a Burroughs extension of ALGOL used mainly for the operating system. (MCP)
Compiler oriented hardware!
It's probably a little late to mention this, but it bothers me a bit: the title is a bit wrong. It is a "UNISYS Burroughs" Film", not Sperry film. Burroughs didn't buy Sperry until about 1986, so this film predates that by almost two decades.
I worked at the Pasadena plant with some of the people in this film from 1972 until it closed, then at Lake Forest until it closed, then at Mission Viejo until it closed.
While the plants have closed the successor machines to the B6500 still exist, are still sold, and are still used. Neither the software nor logical hardware architecture have really changed all that much since 1965. Unisys still pays me to design the processors for these machines.
Hi I Wilton, Thanks very much for your feedback on the title. Actually, the word "Sperry" was in the title line just to help people searching for Sperry related products. You are correct that its a Burroughs film. I corrected modified the title and put "Sperry" in the metatags.) It must have been interesting to see some familiar faces in the film. Thanks for the observation. Good spotting. ~ Victor CHAP
@@ComputerHistoryArchivesProject I always thought Unisys was going to exploit the Sperry merger in advertising. After all, Sperry was the successor to Univac, the first commercial computer, itself a successor to Eniac. "Unisys: the first computer company" :-)
I wonder if anyone has thought of replicating a 6700 inside an FPGA, and running one of the demo boards like the Altera DE-2, the retro folk use.
This is great footage!!! 😀😀😀
Supersonic SS-Vienna. Thanks so much. Glad you enjoy it. Please check out our other vintage computer films as well.
I miss my Burroughs Data Terminal..
Is that Benoit Mandelbrot @2:59? Guess not, it's Bob Creech. Looks like him though.
BADBADBAD marked uninitiated (or bad) memory) named for Ben A. Dent who is show here.
Was there a location in Toronto? I am looking for a repairman named Ted who worked at a company called Burroughs Business Machines who worked there in 1967. Thanks
And here I thought the MCP was just made up for TRON
I always wondered if Disney copied Burroughs for the name MCP!
Dear Sir. I'm trying to contact you to ask permission to sample a piece of this video 9:50 10:00 to show a wire wrap machine in one of my video about wire wrap
Dear gfresources.video, thank you for your note. I have no objection to your using a clip from this video in your presentation. If you do, please reference "Unisys Corporation" as the source for the original clip. They own the copyright to the film. I assume they would let you use it for educational purposes, but not something you could market for sale. Hope this helps! ~ CHAP
@@ComputerHistoryArchivesProject sure all of you will be referenced, the sample will be included in an educational video tutorial about wire wrapping
@@gfr2023 Sounds interesting. Send us the link to your finished product, if you wish. Good Luck!
Unisys still offers this software today. They call it "ClearPath" and it runs on bog-standard server hardware. Organizations that can't seem to shake their ancient software are running it.