Burroughs Computers

Adam, The Burroughs 6800 is a large mainframe. It will require 208-220v 3-phase power and probably air conditioning. I suppose you probably don't want it. Burroughs machines are rare, especially one this old. Burroughs had a policy of taking back their old machines in trade, which they would then destroy to avoid having used machines in competition with their new ones. It is an interesting machine historically, although possibly not the most interesting in the line which is now called the A-Series. Probably about the first in the line was the B5000. The famous early machine was the B5500, there was one at the University of Wisconsin and it was about the first machine I ever used. I remember one of the UW professors contributed to the 6800 architecture (suggestions, at least) and there was a big fuss about whether to get it or a Univac. They ended up with the Univac 1108. The 6800 was to have been a big improvement over the 5500 but was quite late or something. The A-series computers are stack machines. Its a very interesting architecture. At the time of the B5000 series it was considered ahead of its time, but now that architecture is essentially dead. The most recent new stack machine I know of is the original HP 3000 minicomputer from the late 70's early 80's. It is inherently difficult to get a stack machine to run very fast, like today's superscalar microprocessors. But a stack architecture results in small code. The virtual machine for Java byte code is a stack architecture. There are a number of other historically and architecturally interesting things about the Burroughs A-series line and probably the 6800 in particular. If you remember TRON, the evil "MCP" gets its name from the Burroughs operating system (Master Control Program.) There is a Burroughs thread running at the moment in alt.folklore.computers. Please find out if its just the machine or if there is documentation and/or software. I would like to see the whole machine saved, but if that turns out to be impossible at least maybe good docs can be saved. Ideally there would be hardware manuals including user reference manuals and schematics, diagnostic software and manuals, operating system and application software and manuals. Possibly if the closet contains only the machine other folks may have documentation in their office. If you don't want it I would be very interested, but if you are in Australia it could be very expensive to haul it back here. Please keep in touch and let us know what you find out. Paul Pierce http://www.teleport.com/~prp/collect/