The Burroughs Corporation was a major American manufacturer of business equipment. The company was founded in 1886 as the American Arithmometer Company and after the 1986 merger with Sperry Univac was renamed as 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. And while it was one of the largest producers of mainframe computers in the world, Burroughs also produced related equipment as well, including typewriters and printers.

The main target market of the B26 was the banking sector for use in their branches. They were mostly used in "clustered "configurations - one unit was used as master unit and several other units (without hard disk) were connected as slave units. The master unit was handling the file system and the data communications for the slave units. In Europe a number of large banks had several thousands of those machines. Air France was also a large customer. It was also used in the commercial world, but to a lesser extent because of a lack of packaged application software. The main mistake first Burroughs then Unisys made was to tie the sale of CTOS to the sale of proprietary hardware which limited its market. CTOS was a real and very reliable operating system light years ahead of windows.

The Burroughs part number is 3626 0024. These were very kindly donated by Christopher B Clemson.

Manufacturer: Burroughs
Date: 1984

This exhibit has a reference ID of CH28825. Please quote this reference ID in any communication with the Centre for Computing History.

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