[HN Gopher] Burroughs B 5500 Infomration Processing System (1964...
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Burroughs B 5500 Infomration Processing System (1964) [pdf]
Author : doener
Score : 75 points
Date : 2022-02-04 09:18 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (s3data.computerhistory.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (s3data.computerhistory.org)
| amznbyebyebye wrote:
| Wow cool to see this pop up here. My dad worked for this company
| in its heyday before it was acquired by Unisys I think. Used to
| make mainframes. He came to the USA from an Indian village
| without any formal cs education. Completely self taught his way
| through tech. Gave me a copy of K&R when I was a kid and
| kickstarted my own journey.
| noduerme wrote:
| Cool brochure. I think they might have gone a little nuts with
| the tiny dots representing "computing"... I would have thrown
| some fun graphics in those boxes. Maybe some hot secretaries in
| sunglasses, martinis, olives, stretching toes on the beach while
| your monster 8k computer churns away in the office...
| doener wrote:
| Via https://www.golem.de/news/gary-kildall-der-mann-der-das-
| pc-b...
| greenyoda wrote:
| Interesting how minimal the operator's console is, compared to
| the IBM System/360 machines from the same era, which you can see
| photos of here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360
|
| The complete reference manual for the B 5500 can be found here:
| https://www.vt100.net/manx/details/21,7121
| 4x5-Guy wrote:
| There was a completed cabinet devoted to outputs for the field
| engineer. All the register were displayed, as well as buttons
| to set them. At least on later systems, they were in a big
| square, and someone patched the OS to display the Burroughs,
| big B, logo during the systems idle time.
| awful wrote:
| I recall; miniature incandescent bulbs embedded into push
| switches that could display/set registers, it was very
| important to test the bulbs before trusting them (a long
| press) else a burned out bulb may catch you off guard. Right
| next to the core memory cabinet, someone accurately patched
| it to show huge "$" during idle time!!
| rbanffy wrote:
| The lamp test was the only button I was allowed to press on
| my company's 4341.
| jbdigriz990 wrote:
| Good a time as any to ask if anyone has come across the sources
| for the OS. Bob Supnik has been looking for it a long time for
| simh. The story is it disappeared at some point into the bowels
| of the company that took over the service contracts for these
| machines. Possibly Indian. Anyone know for sure or have any
| contacts?
| gjvc wrote:
| No idea, but you might find someone who could help via a google
| search for ...b5000 emulator burroughs...
| tralarpa wrote:
| > if anyone has come across the sources for the OS
|
| Wouldn't that be this one?
|
| http://www.phkimpel.us/B5500/webSite/SoftwareRequest.html
| jbdigriz990 wrote:
| Looks like it. I guess my info was a little stale. Thanks for
| the link!
| rbanffy wrote:
| I remember at CCE (consumer electronics company in Brazil)
| they had an A-6 with hot failover to a bank's A-10 across
| the street. It was pretty normal to see the MCP guru
| reading the source code for the OS (in ALGOL).
| pjmlp wrote:
| Given that Burroughs OSes are still being sold as part of
| Unisys ClearPath MCP (naturally not 1:1 with 1960's), I doubt
| Unisys would be that happy.
| Cullinet wrote:
| "Burroughs software was designed to run only on proprietary
| hardware. For this reason, Burroughs was free to distribute
| the source code of all software it sold, including the MCP,
| which was designed with this openness in mind. "
|
| so it should be around :
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_MCP
| rbanffy wrote:
| Should we really try to run Tron's villain?
|
| It's no coincidence Alan Kay, Bonnie McBird's husband, was
| working at Unisys when she wrote the script.
| rbanffy wrote:
| You can download an official emulator from their website.
| It's proprietary and runs on Windows, and you have to sign a
| license promising you'll only use it for development.
|
| But I have to warn you: It is one of the most user hostile
| OSs I've have ever seen.
|
| If anyone thinks vi or Emacs are hard, they should play with
| CANDE.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Part of the technical school tranship was on OS/400 state
| of the art in early 1990's doing system backups to tapes, I
| also did my typing exam for computing in PCs running MS-DOS
| 3.3 with edlin, I think CANDE is manageable. :)
| LordHz wrote:
| Both my parents worked for Burroughs and my father retired from
| Unisys 20 years ago. I grew up in the server rooms and
| accidentally pushed the big red emergency shutdown button once
| when I was about 6. I helped my mom debug COBOL code on our
| dining room table. I've been in IT for 30 years and it is always
| amazing to see how much has changed and yet how much hasn't.
| Thanks for the nostalgia trip.
| shrubble wrote:
| Gary Kildall of CP/M fame, used the B5500 and was heavily
| influenced by it.
|
| His graduate thesis involved an implementation of APL on the
| B5500, using words instead of the special characters that APL
| usually used, such as 'RHO' instead of the Greek symbol.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Having experiences like this is something incredibly valuable
| for an engineer. This is why, when people ask me what language
| should they learn, I suggest they learn something completely
| different from what they know. If you know Python, don't learn
| Java. Learn Lisp instead. Or APL (or "learn to make good
| comments the hard way"). Or FORTH.
| smoyer wrote:
| Our high-school had a B 5500 for the school district's
| administrative functions and it eventually was also used to teach
| students software development (the course was titled Computer
| Math and taught by the same teacher I had for statistics).
| Naturally, having students on the same system where their grades
| were stored led to some interesting "events". I also remember one
| of the kids (a fast typist) entering SpaceWars into the system.
|
| We had 10 card punch stations and ten glass terminals in our
| classroom which was adjacent to the room housing the computer. I
| don't remember seeing a separate operator's terminal but there
| was definitely the field tech cabinet described by 4x5-Guy.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| You have to take a moment to appreciate that a "Major Computer
| Company" (Burroughs) made bank selling these systems to large
| businesses to handle things like their accounting etc. And yet
| today you can emulate the entire system with all of its
| peripherals on an ESP32 microprocessor that you can buy for $5.
|
| It was this sort of realization by people in the 80's who were
| seeing Microprocessors that could do much of what computers could
| do at the start of their careers, who thought "Wow, we can make a
| 'microcomputer' that does all that too."
|
| It is possible today to write a full accounting package that
| tracks an entire families budget for all the things they buy and
| all their expenses and income that runs on a $2 chip with another
| $5 in peripherals. If you re-use the family TV for a display, you
| can build an inexpensive appliance that could help a family
| manage their budget, wirelessly send required data to a tax
| calculation service or program, and never need software
| "updates".
|
| This is the opportunity of the "new" microprocessor revolution
| (in my opinion), which is basically one computer per program. And
| the whole package "just works."
| JJMcJ wrote:
| Friend refused to take small computers seriously, this was late
| 80s. Reminiscing about Control Data back in 60s. Looked up
| specs, even then an 80386 with math coprocessor could run rings
| around the CDC systems.
|
| Don't get me wrong, the CDCs were great achievements, it was
| just my friend didn't keep up with the times. He'd gone into
| non-technical work so he can maybe be excused.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I hear ya! I find it interesting that TODAY people grab a
| "Raspberry Pi" equivalent machine when something much much
| simpler will do.
| awful wrote:
| In retrospect it would surprise some at how advanced the B5000
| arch. and implementations were, virtual memory and concurrent,
| parallel, quorum processing and so on. I learned the stack based,
| superscalar B7800 CPU to the gate, bit level; single clocking and
| chasing the op codes and small code through the entire machine
| including the IO and stacks in memory. I was supporting 4x4
| (cpuxio) B7800 and a 2x2 B6700 and all peripherals including
| hundreds of disk spindles at a 24x7 site. As well as the IOM and
| then new 4k chip memory infrastructure. Unfortunately I was not
| able to spend any time at the OS level though, running an early
| C(?) and Cobol compilers maybe. Spent months taught by Jerry
| Jackson at the Paoli plant. And sadly no longer have any tapes or
| docs. My last experience was confguring host devices allowing
| high speed direct parallel communications between disparate
| running systems. I cannot describe how powerful the exposure to
| these technologies were for my future understanding.
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| You can almost always go back to mainframe for inspiration -
| back in the day they pretty much solved every problem you can
| think of. It has just taken 40-60 years to be able to do the
| same thing on consumer class hardware.
|
| Last I checked there was still no mechanism where I could bill
| back resource usage in a multi-tenant kubernetes cluster so I
| think there is still work to do.
| pjmlp wrote:
| We aren't fully there yet, some of them like Burroughs, were
| already using quite safe systems programming languages.
|
| ESPOL/NEWP were most likely the first ones to have unsafe
| blocks, as I think JOVIAL lacked them.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > bill back resource usage
|
| If you are not oversubscribed, you can just count the
| allocation.
|
| Maybe performance counters can help. How long does it take to
| read op counts prior to a context switch?
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| Computer architecture books of the 1980s mostly featured the
| B5000 and the CDC 6600 as poster children for what could be
| done with hardware. Some IBMs too, of course.
| khaledh wrote:
| A notable fact about the B5000 (1961; the first model of this
| family) is that it was the first commercial computer to implement
| (segmented) virtual memory. It was preceded only by Ferranti
| Atlas which was the first to implement paged virtual memory.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| Title typo: "Infomration"
| dang wrote:
| Past related threads. Can anybody find others?
|
| _Burroughs B5000 / B5500 / B5700 Gallery_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17921953 - Sept 2018 (1
| comment)
|
| _Burroughs B5500 emulator_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17917005 - Sept 2018 (14
| comments)
|
| _The Architecture of the Burroughs B-5000 (1982)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10822777 - Jan 2016 (23
| comments)
|
| _The Architecture of the Burroughs B5000 (1982)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6988535 - Dec 2013 (30
| comments)
|
| _The Burroughs B5000 - 20 Years Later and Still Ahead of the
| Times?_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4009999 - May 2012
| (55 comments)
|
| _Oral History of Bob Barton and the Burroughs B5000 team (1985)_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2855508 - Aug 2011 (7
| comments)
| lebuffon wrote:
| Probably not surprising but the 5500 had an impact on Charles
| Moore, inventor of Forth.
|
| https://colorforth.github.io/HOPL.html
| melikeburgers wrote:
| What a great link! And quite the coincidence for me.
|
| My dad worked at Burroughs in the Medium business group
| (B2500-B4900 series). He was there from '76-'92, even after the
| Unisys merger (Burroughs+Sperry). I've been looking for a good
| condition user manual of one of products in the medium series to
| keep in my home office.
|
| Any ideas on where to find such a thing?
| dsiegel2275 wrote:
| Interesting fact, the Beat Generation writer William S. Burroughs
| was the grandson of the founder of the Burroughs Corporation.
| Cullinet wrote:
| John Dvorak has a interesting piece on Burroughs here :
|
| "The [ElectroData derived Burroughs 205] drum had two sections.
| The high speed access section which had each piece of data
| duplicated 10 times and offset on various bands on the drum to
| increase the access time by 10. Here the average data access
| time was .85 milliseconds."
|
| my mom performed her bank clerk job on Burroughs Adding
| Machines, in the early 50s.
|
| IBM famously was required to sign the 50 year Consent Decree
| for hobbling the 7 Dwarves by developing new machines using
| sales and supply contract deposit payments for vapor ware
| https://techmonitor.ai/techonology/ibm_and_the_1956_consent_...
|
| http://www.dvorak.org/blog/ibm-and-the-seven-dwarfs-dwarf-on...
|
| edit : Dvorak auto correct on phone sorry
| rbanffy wrote:
| > The high speed access section which had each piece of data
| duplicated 10 times
|
| Almost an early RAID-1.
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(page generated 2022-02-04 23:01 UTC)