An excellent series. I'm also of an age to remember Mainframes, COBOL etc., and I also don't miss them. I remember the sheer sense of panic by fellow Computer Room Staff when PCs were becoming common and looked like becoming the future! Today Stagnation is the curse. I still hear "...but we've always done it this way".
I was part of the implementation team for the Burroughs B1500. Wayne Wilner was a colleague of mine and he wrote several papers about the B1500, as I recall, but the designer of the B1500 and all Burroughs language-directed architectures (B3500, B5500, B6500) was Bob Barton. The B1500 implementation was in Santa Barbara, CA. Barton's office was in La Jolla, CA. Wayne may hae gone to work with Barton at one point. I joined the B1500 team as part of the SDL (implementation language) language design and compiler team. The advisor for the initial design of SDL was Bill McKeenan, professor of computer science at UC Santa Cruz. There's much more about the B1500 story if you're interested.
Don yes please share whatever information you can always looking for more, and if you'd like to come on the channel and talk about your experiences I would be grateful
I am a lover of the 5000, 6000, 7000 series. I also worked with the 1860. All excellent machines. I love reading the stories about the development of the 5500. They were revolutionary machines. I worked with 6700 too. Congratulations on your work.
In th end sixties my mother used to ‘program’ the mechanical accounting machines in Amsterdam. Not digital but some kind of tiny screws to set the tabs for the columns. Some days, before bringing me to kindergarten, I went along with her. Ther she had also met my father who worked for the same Dutch office machine importer that many years later introduced the first IBM PC.
Failure to innovate, both in products and market approach, got Unisys to where they are today. As you said, the days of the mainframe were coming to an end. Or, stated another way, the role of proprietary architectures were. For better or for worse, DOS/Windows, UNIX and now, Linux running on standardized hardware have taken over. For a while, UNIX on RISC/propriety hardware took over as the next alternative to mainframes. It was during that timeframe that UNISYS made the wrong bet. Perhaps, the only one they could, financially. The end of any significant role for Unisys in the hardware business came about with the ES7000; a bizarre attempt to apply a mainframe approach to a scale-out ecosystem. Again, maybe the only choice they had at that point. Ironic how profit from mainframes continues to play in the quarterly results. Enjoyed your discussion. Wish someone would undertake that for the small business, F/E/L/B7-8x evolution. I lived that world, and it is quite a story.
The college I attended for my Comp Sci degree in the mid 80s had a Burroughs 6800 as the college mainframe, shared with the Comp Sci dept. It was fairly old and unreliable. SUNY had a bid out to replace the mainframes on a number of campuses, but our mainframe would die before then. Burroughs decided, at their cost since they were participating in the bid, to replace our mainframe with an A10.
Nice! My father worked for Burroughs from the early 60s till they became Unisys (?) in the late 80s when he passed. Did some cool stuff for US Navy. Thanks for the explanations. I was too young to appreciate what he did, so it’s nice to learn more.
Great series, DJ Ware, I've thoroughly enjoyed it. Your message is well-received, too. I think this is a big reason I'm intrigued by vintage computing. It's not about nostalgia, it's enjoying the innovative ideas, the people and thinking of the time, and attempting to gain inspiration from it. We clearly are in need of inspiration, moving ahead. The entire industry seems to only care about (short-term) profits these days, and it's become dull and like you say, stagnant. Anyway: always happy when you turn on your soapbox. Keep up the good work man, I appreciate you. :)
Amazing stories, that was the real devops back then! I agree on the stagnation comment, specially on the x86 world, I hope the future may bring better improvements on HW/SW.
Yes, Nostalgia is great, but who wants to go back to vacuum tubes as just one example. Very Interesting. .I remember seeing, late 1970s to early 1980s, an expansion in the Burroughs Computer Business in the UK. The advertisements in the jobs section of the newspapers then wanted mobile computer service engineers . Burroughs seemed to be on a roll back then.
Is there any source for the actual hardware Schematics / architecture strategy for the BUNCH computer hardware? I am interested in re- presenting the digital structure in SSI, MSI, lower LSI components, as well as the support operating coding. Thus to stimulate new architectures in VHLSI CHIPS. Thinking to ,say, meld the MC68XX,S with updated Transputer circuitry, in a multi core format.
The A Series succeeded Large Systems, which succeeded the B5000 family. Nothing to do with Small or Medium Systems at all. And this mainframe product line continued for decades. If Unisys was selling Windows Server hardware it was pretty much invisible to the market.
Any company that chose a name like Unisys deserved to go under. They should have gone with Burroughs since it sounds better than Sperry. I hope Windows continues to stagnate so that Linux can surpass it once and for all. Moore's law seems to have slowed down but hardware tech is not exactly stagnating.
The name "Unisys" supposedly came from an employee naming contest and is supposedly a concatenation of "United" "Information" "Systems". I don't know how that entry was selected (random drawing? CEO favoritism?), but two of my own suggestions (which I didn't bother entering) were "Hindenburg" and "Titanic". If it came down to a choice between one of the original names, I'm still partial to Univac even though many still think that it's the name of a vacuum cleaner. As for "stagnation" and operating systems, I'm amused by any comments by anyone who thinks that Windows and/or Linux are somehow "modern" in any sense other than they were cooked up after MCP and/or OS1100/OS2200. All of these OSs continue to evolve under the skin which has to remain more or less fixed so as to maintain backward compatibility for user programs so long as they exist.
Research is needed here. Most of the topics he talks about the company here are partially or wholly incorrect. A lot of important industry firsts were omitted. He seems to talk more about 'his' experience as a computer user, with interfacing sales. This is a poor rendition of Burroughs company history.
I was a Burroughs System Engineer at Goleta/Pasadena working on Small Systems. I can't speak to the early Burroughs history he mentions - but I can tell you he was spot on for Medium and Small Systems descriptions.
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An excellent series. I'm also of an age to remember Mainframes, COBOL etc., and I also don't miss them. I remember the sheer sense of panic by fellow Computer Room Staff when PCs were becoming common and looked like becoming the future! Today Stagnation is the curse. I still hear "...but we've always done it this way".
Old Burroughs Medium System guy here - great video!
Fun times with Powerful Data Processing )
@@CyberGizmo - fun fact - B4900 which came out in '79 had fetch pipeline and branch prediction
I was part of the implementation team for the Burroughs B1500. Wayne Wilner was a colleague of mine and he wrote several papers about the B1500, as I recall, but the designer of the B1500 and all Burroughs language-directed architectures (B3500, B5500, B6500) was Bob Barton. The B1500 implementation was in Santa Barbara, CA. Barton's office was in La Jolla, CA. Wayne may hae gone to work with Barton at one point. I joined the B1500 team as part of the SDL (implementation language) language design and compiler team. The advisor for the initial design of SDL was Bill McKeenan, professor of computer science at UC Santa Cruz. There's much more about the B1500 story if you're interested.
Didn’t know that I know Wilmer worked on the b1700
Don yes please share whatever information you can always looking for more, and if you'd like to come on the channel and talk about your experiences I would be grateful
I am a lover of the 5000, 6000, 7000 series. I also worked with the 1860. All excellent machines. I love reading the stories about the development of the 5500. They were revolutionary machines. I worked with 6700 too. Congratulations on your work.
In th end sixties my mother used to ‘program’ the mechanical accounting machines in Amsterdam. Not digital but some kind of tiny screws to set the tabs for the columns. Some days, before bringing me to kindergarten, I went along with her. Ther she had also met my father who worked for the same Dutch office machine importer that many years later introduced the first IBM PC.
Very nice and an interesting story
Failure to innovate, both in products and market approach, got Unisys to where they are today. As you said, the days of the mainframe were coming to an end. Or, stated another way, the role of proprietary architectures were. For better or for worse, DOS/Windows, UNIX and now, Linux running on standardized hardware have taken over. For a while, UNIX on RISC/propriety hardware took over as the next alternative to mainframes. It was during that timeframe that UNISYS made the wrong bet. Perhaps, the only one they could, financially. The end of any significant role for Unisys in the hardware business came about with the ES7000; a bizarre attempt to apply a mainframe approach to a scale-out ecosystem. Again, maybe the only choice they had at that point.
Ironic how profit from mainframes continues to play in the quarterly results.
Enjoyed your discussion. Wish someone would undertake that for the small business, F/E/L/B7-8x evolution. I lived that world, and it is quite a story.
The college I attended for my Comp Sci degree in the mid 80s had a Burroughs 6800 as the college mainframe, shared with the Comp Sci dept. It was fairly old and unreliable. SUNY had a bid out to replace the mainframes on a number of campuses, but our mainframe would die before then. Burroughs decided, at their cost since they were participating in the bid, to replace our mainframe with an A10.
I thoroughly enjoyed the series and this particular installment. Burroughs brought so much innovation and ushered in many technologies. Thanks. 🙂
Welcome, Ezmix been wanting to do that one for a long time, and so I saved it for the last in the series
Nice! My father worked for Burroughs from the early 60s till they became Unisys (?) in the late 80s when he passed. Did some cool stuff for US Navy. Thanks for the explanations. I was too young to appreciate what he did, so it’s nice to learn more.
Nice story and you are very welcome
Your father was a hero.
Great series, DJ Ware, I've thoroughly enjoyed it.
Your message is well-received, too. I think this is a big reason I'm intrigued by vintage computing. It's not about nostalgia, it's enjoying the innovative ideas, the people and thinking of the time, and attempting to gain inspiration from it. We clearly are in need of inspiration, moving ahead. The entire industry seems to only care about (short-term) profits these days, and it's become dull and like you say, stagnant.
Anyway: always happy when you turn on your soapbox. Keep up the good work man, I appreciate you. :)
Another great episode DJ👍!
Amazing stories, that was the real devops back then! I agree on the stagnation comment, specially on the x86 world, I hope the future may bring better improvements on HW/SW.
Yes, Nostalgia is great, but who wants to go back to vacuum tubes as just one example. Very Interesting. .I remember seeing, late 1970s to early 1980s, an expansion in the Burroughs Computer Business in the UK. The advertisements in the jobs section of the newspapers then wanted mobile computer service engineers . Burroughs seemed to be on a roll back then.
MIL was the Micro Instruction Language
Close it was Micro Implementation Language I finally found the manual
Is there any source for the actual hardware Schematics / architecture strategy for the BUNCH computer hardware? I am interested in re- presenting the digital structure in SSI, MSI, lower LSI components, as well as the support operating coding. Thus to stimulate new architectures in VHLSI CHIPS. Thinking to ,say, meld the MC68XX,S with updated Transputer circuitry, in a multi core format.
The A Series succeeded Large Systems, which succeeded the B5000 family. Nothing to do with Small or Medium Systems at all. And this mainframe product line continued for decades. If Unisys was selling Windows Server hardware it was pretty much invisible to the market.
And who are you?
Any company that chose a name like Unisys deserved to go under. They should have gone with Burroughs since it sounds better than Sperry. I hope Windows continues to stagnate so that Linux can surpass it once and for all. Moore's law seems to have slowed down but hardware tech is not exactly stagnating.
The name "Unisys" supposedly came from an employee naming contest and is supposedly a concatenation of "United" "Information" "Systems".
I don't know how that entry was selected (random drawing? CEO favoritism?), but two of my own suggestions (which I didn't bother entering) were "Hindenburg" and "Titanic".
If it came down to a choice between one of the original names, I'm still partial to Univac even though many still think that it's the name of a vacuum cleaner.
As for "stagnation" and operating systems, I'm amused by any comments by anyone who thinks that Windows and/or Linux are somehow "modern" in any sense other than they were cooked up after MCP and/or OS1100/OS2200.
All of these OSs continue to evolve under the skin which has to remain more or less fixed so as to maintain backward compatibility for user programs so long as they exist.
My entry for the name was UniBlab, but they didn't go for it
AI ugh! Computers are or were a tool for humanity not a tool for enslavement!
Research is needed here. Most of the topics he talks about the company here are partially or wholly incorrect. A lot of important industry firsts were omitted. He seems to talk more about 'his' experience as a computer user, with interfacing sales. This is a poor rendition of Burroughs company history.
I was a Burroughs System Engineer at Goleta/Pasadena working on Small Systems. I can't speak to the early Burroughs history he mentions - but I can tell you he was spot on for Medium and Small Systems descriptions.