Old memories: Burroughs Corporation

Comment by bkbroil, on 30-Mar-2007 23:57

This is such a coincidence! I just spent a weekend with my old Unisys coworkers from 1989. It was all of our first jobs out of college and we all have gone to different places in the world....but that was the only job/company in which all of us stayed in touch and have made an effort to get together once a year. (We get together for NCAA March Madness)...

But geez I remember the days when the Unisys stock dropped down to $1 and we were all wondering if we were going to still have jobs.....

BTW, I currently work across the street from the Unisys HQ in PA...

Comment by betsy, on 2-Apr-2007 04:21

My grandfather, Lawrence Droste, worked as a salesman for Burroughs from about the 20's to the 60's and he worked in Germany in the early 30's and then in Brazil and Argentina in the 40's and 50's. I still have a lovely picture of him in a suit on the beach in (probably) Rio. My mother had stock in Burroughs, but then it became Unisys and Michael Blumenthal drove it into the ground. Sigh...

Fun memories, thanks.

Comment by Dennis, on 2-Apr-2007 13:32

The building was in fact our old head office we moved from there to 206 thorndon Quay in about 1978/79 and then on to our two other locations on the Terrace in Wellington.

Some of us even worked there, and still work for the company.

The building is currently owned by Burroughs ex electrical contractor Alan Eastergaard.

Comment by Brett Hodgson, on 3-Apr-2007 15:10

Hi Mauricio

I couldn't pass up this opportunity to let people know what Unisys has been up to recently – in particular how the company that you remember touches the lives of pretty well every New Zealander in some significant way.

Regular visitors to your site are probably aware of the work we do for Inland Revenue, ACC and MAF. But there are a number of other connection points as well. I mention but a few of these below.

Unisys hosts the Landata and Drivers Licence Register, which enable Land Transport New Zealand to manage statutory registry functions for vehicles and drivers; collect a variety of monies and taxes on behalf of the Crown; and provide the safety system for Vehicle Certificates and Warrants of Fitness.

The New Zealand Fire Service depends on Unisys to run its IP-based alarm system to manage emergencies across the country. The telemetry system provides the Fire Service and 435 fire stations around New Zealand with a broad range of information about fires which have started at Kiwi homes and businesses.

In education there's Mindspring, a collaborative web-based learning environment that lets students work at their own pace, and provides teachers with a more efficient way to plan and recording their charges' achievements. Nearly 300 teachers and 7000 students over 60 schools nationwide currently have access to the Mindspring's Learning Gateway.

In banking we have been involved with ASB Bank since 1975, working to provide a secure business environment, central to the transaction processing requirements of ASB Group.

And Unisys client, Foodstuffs Wellington, was first in New Zealand to implement Shop' N Go, self-scanning technology, reducing shopping time. Foodstuffs has also introduced electronic grocery labels, which eliminate the cost of manually updating up to 3000 labels each week.

Last year we introduced the Unisys Security Index, New Zealand's first regular snapshot of public perceptions towards a range of security issues. The Index provides a regular, statistically robust measure of perceptions towards four areas of security - National, Financial, Internet and Personal security.

And we've recently announced that we're expanding the Kapiti Data Centre, upgrading the power supply to the data centre and doubling the current data centre capacity by introducing a variety of new 32-bit and 64-bit hardware.

So, while we're proud of our heritage, we're equally proud of the work we do on behalf of our clients today.

And we have some exciting new announcements due in the market place in the next month.

Brett Hodgson
Managing Director
Unisys New Zealand

Comment by Alan Eastergaard, on 2-Oct-2007 23:47

Hi, I was interested to hear that you had this building listed on a site. I started working for Burroughs as a contractor (Electrical) and worked in the building shown quite a lot including when it was their printing site. I started in 1972 and through the amalgamation (Unisys) and on for many years and shifts. In fact we were still doing some work for them when they shifted sites on the Terrace in Wellington. I also bought the building in or about 1993 and still own it.

Regards to all

Alan Eastergaard

Comment by Ian Douthwaite, on 29-Feb-2008 10:23

Old memories indeed.

I too can remember the days when Unisys stocks took a real dive.

Many will know that Unisys had strong connections in NZ because of its adoption of the LINC product which as conceived and developed in Christchurch for many years. Many of the old LINCsters are still around with Jade Software Corp as it is now.

Burroughs/Unisys maintained a QA group here in Christchurch too which QAed and supported LINC users all over the world, and on all the platforms including the old B and V series, the later A Series, the early and later Unix boxes, and the Sperry-introduced 1100 and 2200 series.

Comment by Tom Parker, on 12-Aug-2008 09:09

The best job I ever had was thriteen years with Burroughs, then it became Unisys, in West Palm Beach, Florida. From 1978 through 1991 I was a Systems Rep supporting marketing and field engineering (FEs) with MCP, compilers, database, communications (remember poll/select?), and being on a regional fly & fix team. I worked mostly on the "medium system" and later the B100 series. The MCP's simplicity and power was, as we all know, highly underrated, JCL anyone?? Burroughs was great on training, and it paid off in spades.

As a customer I first worked on the B2500, then 3500, then 2700, before going to work for Burroughs. It was a system that I took too unlike any other hardware/software platform since. The only complaint was the 6-char limit on file names!! The B1000 series was where the MS never got to, including WFL.

Dabbled a little with LINC but I was more of a systems person than applications. Lots of good memories and good people.

Comment by Jeff Law, on 17-Mar-2009 19:53

Nice to see the old building. I received my Burroughs 'Basic Training Course' in this very building - a room at the upper, front-right as I recall, in 1963 (I think). Later, I received E2000-E4000-E6000 training in the other building, just around the corner, where Technical Section were resident, under the management of Bill Fryer. The E course was run by Wayne ? (can't remember his name unfortunately).

Later still in 1967, I was a Supervisor at the Burroughs Decimal Conversion Plant, where the same Bill Fryer was our manager.

Great days, and a great company with many very innovative and well-built products.

Comment by Raymond Thompson, on 8-Apr-2010 04:48

I started with Burroughs in 1969 in the USAF working on a B-3500 in Cobol. I later transitioned into ASMBLR and BPL writing system control programs. I even developed my own communication protocol to transmit information between remote locations using the B-874 as the communication processor.

In my USAF career we developed compilers for specific languages that ran on a B-6900 and generated B-3500 machine code. A real adventure in cross platform architecture.

At one point in my banking career we needed a feature that the MCP on the B-4900 did not offer, something to do with backup files and the numbering. To appease the banking gods I hand coded my own routine, plugged it into an unused module of the MCP, and had an option (TO RSET) to control the setting.

Really did like those medium systems. Only computer out there that could multiply two 100 digit numbers and get a 200 digit result accurate to the last decimal digit.

Comment by toby, on 11-Aug-2010 05:17

I started with Burroughs on Feb 23, 1973 and left on Feb 23, 1992 . I began as a TC521 repairman (they called us service engineers). I kept at it through the B2500, 3500,4800, 700, 1700, 5900 and later moved into management.

I have wonderful memories and terrible memories. My intent was to be a Burroughs employee for life.

The merger of Burroughs and Sperry was well planned by Wall Street gamers who had zero intelligence about computer manufacturing.

The companies were married and killed by Michael Blumenthal and the Board of Directors-exactly like BlueStar airlines in the movie Wall Street-worth more dead than alive.

The merger changed management focus from creating quality innovative products and services to a yard sale of property and assets until it was a skeleton. Anyway that was my experience.

Comment by Sweep, on 2-Sep-2010 12:41

Back around 1973 I was working for the Waterfront Industry Commision and was programming in COBOL and TC500 Assembler. Oh the joy of plodding down to Wgton Railway Station and getting a Unit to Lower Hutt with the punched cards to compile my latest effort. Punched paper for the TC500 terminal computer.

Comment by Mahesh Balan, on 12-Dec-2010 08:05

I worked for Burroughs in India, my first job out of school, and learnt programming in a B6700. Later worked for a police dept the US for 10 years.

We used LINC to write a law enforcement records management system and I have fond memories of writing in DCALGOL, DMALGOL and running a database on DMS II. We never had a system crash, took our systems down once a year and ran a stable system for many many years. I believe parts of the system are still in operation there. Pity Algol is not taugh anymore anywhere that I know of...

Used to hear about Christchurch a lot in those days, since Linc came from there, glad to see that there are so many still who have fond memories of Burroughs and its fabulous set of machines that set the standard for many inovations.

Cheers,

Mahesh

Comment by Tom Ockey, on 13-Feb-2011 03:41

I was a Burroughs field tech in the Bay Area of California from 1970-1973. It was a great company then, especially working there in the early days of Silicon Valley. I was trying to remember what the SPO command "DS" stood for. Does any one who was an operator remember? I think it stood for "discontinue sort" but I don't remember. Thanks.

Comment by Lynn Lawton, on 16-Feb-2011 21:29

How fascinating after all these yrs to come across this web site and see the photo of what in the 1960-70 was Burroughs head offcie in NZ. I joined Burroughs in 1996 working in their Auckland decimal conversion plant which Bob Reid managed and then was employed by Auckland service manager Colin Lake in 1997 as tech rep.

We did all our training at the tech training centre just around the corner from the head office in a few rooms above a block of shops. I trained on E2,4 and 6 and B500, real advanced stuff those days and loved the hands on type of work.

When I joined Burroughs there was hardly a business without one of their accounting machines in NZ and they certainly dominated the banking sector with their F series accounting machines. I enjoyed 10+ yrs of employment with a great company and team.

Comment by Chris T., on 15-Apr-2011 04:59

I am a Technician in the Canadian Armed Forces, I worked on the B4800 from 1993 until they were replaced by PCs in 1996.

These were the good old days, maintaining these along with the peripherals was a full time job. They almost had a personality. I think for me, my favourite piece to maintain was the Magnetic tape transport unit, I can't remember the model number but it used 10" reels and had columns in which the tape was "sucked" in by vacuum and servos were driven by the amount of light in the columns to try to keep the tape loops in the middle.

I wish I could find a picture of a typical B4800 installation to show our young technicians what fun they missed.

Comment by Paulo H. Silva, on 18-Jun-2011 07:21

These were the good old days, I worked with the old Burroughs machines B6900 ans SerieA (A9BR and A11). My job was as a computer operator, then support analyst in Celma - Brazil (1988)

Comment by Roger Wright, on 3-Sep-2011 03:26

Walked into a Norfolk Va Burroughs office after Navy retirement in '73, filled out app and was hired in '74 to work on Group 1 stuff. One of 3 FEs working on Redactron equipment, (a mistake, in my view) and one of 3 on the TT100,TT102. (Another mistake). Never understood why we were in competition w/ OPG, selling supplies to the same customers. Laid off in '85, after Sperry combo. Good friends, good memories, but moving on was better.

Comment by stephen farrell, on 30-Jan-2012 22:43

I never worked at Buroughs and in fact come from Liverpool England but i have since moved away, a couple of days ago i got into my loft in our new house and found a buroughs computer, a B 26 cpu and floppy hard drive and monitor and keyboard and thought i would look into the name and found this page and thought i would let people who worked at buroughs that there computers reached liverpool