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.
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.
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.
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 Burroughs Large Systems Group produced a family of large 48-bit mainframes using stack machine instruction sets with dense syllables. The first machine in the family was the B5000 in 1961. It was optimized for compiling ALGOL 60 programs extremely well, using single-pass compilers. It evolved into the B5500. Subsequent major redesigns include the B6500/B6700 line and its successors, as well as the separate B8500 line.
Job Control Language (JCL) is a name for scripting languages used on IBM mainframe operating systems to instruct the system on how to run a batch job or start a subsystem.
RPG is a high-level programming language for business applications, introduced in 1959 for the IBM 1401. It is most well known as the primary programming language of IBM's midrange computer product line, including the IBM i operating system. RPG has traditionally featured a number of distinctive concepts, such as the program cycle, and the column-oriented syntax. The most recent version is RPG IV, which includes a number of modernization features, including free-form syntax.
High Level Assembly (HLA) is a language developed by Randall Hyde that allows the use of higher-level language constructs to aid both beginners and advanced assembly developers. It fully supports advanced data types and object-oriented programming. It uses a syntax loosely based on several high-level programming languages (HLLs), such as Pascal, Ada, Modula-2, and C++, to allow creating readable assembly language programs, and to allow HLL programmers to learn HLA as fast as possible.
The MCP is the operating system of the Burroughs small, medium and large systems, including the Unisys Clearpath/MCP systems.
IEFBR14 is an IBM mainframe utility program. It runs in all IBM mainframe environments derived from OS/360, including z/OS. It is a placeholder that returns the exit status zero, similar to the true command on UNIX-like systems.
This article discusses support programs included in or available for OS/360 and successors. IBM categorizes some of these programs as utilities and others as service aids; the boundaries are not always consistent or obvious. Many, but not all, of these programs match the types in utility software.
The Burroughs B2500 through Burroughs B4900 was a series of mainframe computers developed and manufactured by Burroughs Corporation in Pasadena, California, United States, from 1966 to 1991. They were aimed at the business world with an instruction set optimized for the COBOL programming language. They were also known as Burroughs Medium Systems, by contrast with the Burroughs Large Systems and Burroughs Small Systems.
LINC is a fourth-generation programming language, used mostly on Unisys computer systems.
CANDE is a command line shell and text editor on the MCP operating system which runs on the Unisys Clearpath series of mainframes. Originally implemented on Burroughs large systems, it has a range of features for interacting with the operating system execution environment, focused on executing, editing and compiling programs, and creating, copying, moving, renaming, and deleting files in general.
New Executive Programming Language (NEWP) is a high-level programming language used on computers running the Unisys operating system Master Control Program (MCP). The language is used to write the operating system and other system utility software, though it can also be used to write user software. Several constructs separate it from extended ALGOL on which it is based. Language operators such as MEMORY which allows direct memory access are strictly used by programs running as the MCP. NEWP replaced Burroughs Executive Systems Problem Oriented Language (ESPOL)
The Unisys Data Management System II (DMSII) is a database system originally created by the Burroughs Corporation in 1972. It was available on the Burroughs Small (B1000), Medium and Large System product lines. The later, A Series, Clearpath, Libra product lines support it and in recent releases of Unisys Clearpath software it has been renamed as the Enterprise Database Server for ClearPath MCP. The original DMS II used a network model.
OS/360, officially known as IBM System/360 Operating System, is a discontinued batch processing operating system developed by IBM for their then-new System/360 mainframe computer, announced in 1964; it was influenced by the earlier IBSYS/IBJOB and Input/Output Control System (IOCS) packages for the IBM 7090/7094 and even more so by the PR155 Operating System for the IBM 1410/7010 processors. It was one of the earliest operating systems to require the computer hardware to include at least one direct access storage device.
In computing job control refers to the control of multiple tasks or jobs on a computer system, ensuring that they each have access to adequate resources to perform correctly, that competition for limited resources does not cause a deadlock where two or more jobs are unable to complete, resolving such situations where they do occur, and terminating jobs that, for any reason, are not performing as expected.
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 figure shows a high-level architecture of the OS 2200 system identifying major hardware and software components. The majority of the Unisys software is included in the subsystems and applications area of the model. For example, the database managers are subsystems and the compilers are applications.