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The Burroughs Corporation was a major American manufacturer of business equipment. The company was founded in 1886 as the American Arithmometer Company. In 1986, it merged with Sperry UNIVAC to form Unisys. The company's history paralleled many of the major developments in computing. At its start, it produced mechanical adding machines, and later moved into programmable ledgers and then computers. It was one of the largest producers of mainframe computers in the world, also producing related equipment including typewriters and printers.
A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and large-scale transaction processing. A mainframe computer is large but not as large as a supercomputer and has more processing power than some other classes of computers, such as minicomputers, servers, workstations, and personal computers. Most large-scale computer-system architectures were established in the 1960s, but they continue to evolve. Mainframe computers are often used as servers.
Computer operating systems (OSes) provide a set of functions needed and used by most application programs on a computer, and the links needed to control and synchronize computer hardware. On the first computers, with no operating system, every program needed the full hardware specification to run correctly and perform standard tasks, and its own drivers for peripheral devices like printers and punched paper card readers. The growing complexity of hardware and application programs eventually made operating systems a necessity for everyday use.
The UNIVAC I was the first general-purpose electronic digital computer design for business application produced in the United States. It was designed principally by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the inventors of the ENIAC. Design work was started by their company, Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC), and was completed after the company had been acquired by Remington Rand. In the years before successor models of the UNIVAC I appeared, the machine was simply known as "the UNIVAC".
UNIVAC was a line of electronic digital stored-program computers starting with the products of the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation. Later the name was applied to a division of the Remington Rand company and successor organizations.
The UNIVAC 1100/2200 series is a series of compatible 36-bit computer systems, beginning with the UNIVAC 1107 in 1962, initially made by Sperry Rand. The series continues to be supported today by Unisys Corporation as the ClearPath Dorado Series. The solid-state 1107 model number was in the same sequence as the earlier vacuum-tube computers, but the early computers were not compatible with the solid-state successors.
The UNIVAC 1103 or ERA 1103, a successor to the UNIVAC 1101, was a computer system designed by Engineering Research Associates and built by the Remington Rand corporation in October 1953. It was the first computer for which Seymour Cray was credited with design work.
FIELDATA was a pioneering computer project run by the US Army Signal Corps in the late 1950s that intended to create a single standard for collecting and distributing battlefield information. In this respect it could be thought of as a generalization of the US Air Force's SAGE system that was being created at about the same time.
The UNIVAC Solid State was a magnetic drum-based solid-state computer announced by Sperry Rand in December 1958 as a response to the IBM 650. It was one of the first computers offered for sale to be (nearly) entirely solid-state, using 700 transistors, and 3000 magnetic amplifiers (FERRACTOR) for primary logic, and 20 vacuum tubes largely for power control. It came in two versions, the Solid State 80 and the Solid State 90. In addition to the "80/90" designation, there were two variants of the Solid State – the SS I 80/90 and the SS II 80/90. The SS II series included two enhancements – the addition of 1,280 words of core memory and support for magnetic tape drives. The SS I had only the standard 5,000-word drum memory described in this article and no tape drives.
The University of Michigan Executive System, or UMES, a batch operating system developed at the University of Michigan in 1958, was widely used at many universities. Based on the General Motors Executive System for the IBM 701, UMES was revised to work on the mainframe computers in use at the University of Michigan during this time and to work better for the small student jobs that were expected to be the primary work load at the University.
The UNIVAC LARC, short for the Livermore Advanced Research Computer, is a mainframe computer designed to a requirement published by Edward Teller in order to run hydrodynamic simulations for nuclear weapon design. It was one of the earliest supercomputers.
EXEC II is a discontinued operating system developed for the UNIVAC 1107 by Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) while under contract to UNIVAC to develop the machine's COBOL compiler. They developed EXEC II because Univac's EXEC I operating system development was late. Because of this the COBOL compiler was actually designed to run under EXEC II, not EXEC I as specified in the original contract.
The UNIVAC 418 was a transistorized, 18-bit word magnetic-core memory machine made by Sperry Univac. The name came from its 4-microsecond memory cycle time and 18-bit word. The assembly language for this class of computers was TRIM III and ART418.
The surface-barrier transistor is a type of transistor developed by Philco in 1953 as an improvement to the alloy-junction transistor and the earlier point-contact transistor. Like the modern Schottky transistor, it offered much higher speed than earlier transistors and used metal–semiconductor junctions, but unlike the schottky transistor, both junctions were metal–semiconductor junctions.
Exec or EXEC may refer to:
VS/9 is a computer operating system for the UNIVAC Series 90 mainframes, used during the late 1960s through 1980s. The 90/60 and 90/70 were repackaged Univac 9700 computers. After the RCA acquisition by Sperry, it was determined that the RCA TSOS operating system was far more advanced than the Univac counterpart, so the company opted to merge the Univac hardware with the RCA software and introduced the 90/70. The 90/60 was introduced shortly thereafter as a slower, less expensive 90/70. It was not until the introduction of the 90/80 that VS/9 finally had a hardware platform optimized to take full advantage of its capability to allow both interactive and batch operations on the same computer.
The AN/UYK-7 was the standard 32-bit computer of the United States Navy for surface ship and submarine platforms, starting in 1970. It was used in the Navy's NTDS & Aegis combat systems and U.S. Coast Guard, and the navies of U.S. allies. It was also used by the U.S. Army.
OS 2200 is the operating system for the Unisys ClearPath Dorado family of mainframe systems. The operating system kernel of OS 2200 is a lineal descendant of Exec 8 for the UNIVAC 1108. Documentation and other information on current and past Unisys systems can be found on the Unisys public support website.
The UNIVAC 9000 series is a discontinued line of computers introduced by Sperry Rand in the mid-1960s to compete with the low end of the IBM System/360 series. The 9200 and 9300 implement the same restricted 16-bit subset of the System/360 instruction set as the IBM 360/20, while the UNIVAC 9400 implements a subset of the full 32-bit System/360 instruction set. The 9400 was roughly equivalent to the IBM 360/30.
References
- ↑ Gray, George (March 1993). "EXEC II". Unisys History Newsletter. 1 (3). Archived from the original on August 9, 2017.
