Burroughs F6100 F6700 accounting machines

[woodchips]

Perhaps not electronic computers, but I will ask anyway.

Long ago I bought three Burroughs F6100 and F6700 accounting machines, I have just started to have a go at repairing them.

These are large, complex machines, with a programmable plate to determine what and how it works.

The snag is I have no instructions for use, and whilst it isn't that hard to work it out knowing exactly how and what it does would be very useful.

Does anyone have, or know of, instructions and servicing information for these, and other Burroughs adding and accounting machines. I have piles of servicing and operating information for NCR (National Cash Registers) machines but they are rare in the UK, Burroughs are far more common.

These are mechanical, not the B series electronic computers which seem to come up in all the searches.

 

[MikeS]

Wow!

You've set yourself quite the challenge there ;-)

Interesting machines to be sure, and largely forgotten in the history of vintage computers. Originally they were completely mechanical (aside from the driving motor), programmed with exchangeable racks of varying length pins; as time went on rotary readouts were added that allowed connection to external 'peripherals' such as multipliers, paper tape punches etc, and finally they transitioned into the all-electronic 'E' series, still with the same general layout. Those were replaced by the more modern-looking solid-state memory & program series 'L', and finally the small disk-based B80 'real' computers.

It's a shame that there's so little technical information as these machines really represented the transition of manually operated office accounting equipment from gears and levers to modern LSI integrated circuits, in parallel with the much better known punched-card batch processing world of IBM unit record equipment.

I don't think you'll find much information out there, especially maintenance and servicing info; there is an F2000 manual on bitsavers FWIW:
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/burrou...ies_F2000_Computer_Instruction_Book_Dec62.pdf

I had four Series F machines back in the day and actually programmed and used one (my very own 'home computer' ;-) ), but I couldn't tell you much about them today. There was quite a variety of 'Sensimatic' models; I'm not familiar with the 6100 and 6700, how about some pictures?

At least one of mine was the old-style (F500 I think):

And also one of the newer ones, with the typewriter:

I may still have the stand for that one, but that'd be all that's left of my collection ;-(

The guts:

All those little levers are for reading the pin lengths in the (not shown) program panel.

Have FUN!!!

 

[MikeS]

A sample program 'coding' form:

 

[Chuck(G)]

When I saw the thread title "Accounting Machines", I immediately thought of the IBM 407. Did Burroughs also make their own version of the 407?

 

[MikeS]

When I saw the thread title "Accounting Machines", I immediately thought of the IBM 407. Did Burroughs also make their own version of the 407?

Not as far as I know, although the electronic versions did have some batch processing capabilities using paper tape, punched cards, magnetic striped ledger cards and mag tape and disks.

The IBM corporation was built on their EAMs (Electric Accounting Machines), which were almost entirely batch processing machines for handling relatively large volumes of data on punched cards, based on Hollerith's machines to process the 1890 US census. The 407 (and 402, 403 etc.) was essentially a somewhat intelligent printer that took a stack of cards after they'd been keypunched, sorted, merged etc. on other machines, optionally did some basic addition and subtraction, and printed a run of the resulting invoices, reports, etc.

Burroughs, NCR, etc. were oriented more to immediate individual transactions, such as updating your bank book and the bank's ledger and journal when you came in to make a deposit. The programming paradigm was actually very similar to modern spreadsheets: the machine would tab across a line (row) on a report page and/or a ledger card to specific programmed columns where it would read a set of pins that determined whether to accept operator input or perform a calculation and print, similar in principle to Excel reading and processing the formula in a cell.

As I said, in time they became more and more 'real' computers with various storage options (paper tape, (edge-) punched cards, cassettes and finally disks; the only thing that remained unique was the usual wide carriage integrated printer and keyboard, internally they were 'normal' computers with disk drives (hard and floppy) and the usual I/O options like line printers, communication options, CRT and plasma displays, etc.

The L9000 and the B80, the last of this line of Burroughs computers:

 

[Chuck(G)]

Oh, I know about the 407; used and even programmed one (even took a class in doing so). Usually, one was set up to do 80-80 listings of keypunched stuff as a way of verifying without using valuable computer time. They lasted well into the 1970s as a fixture.

Less useful on its own; it was more part of a unit-record installation, particularly if you wanted card output (a 519 was typically part of the setup). If you actually wanted to read what was on the cards that were punched, you also needed a 552. Add a few keypunches and a sorter like the 082 and you were good to do business.

 

[MikeS]

Oh, I know you know about the 407 and its ilk; that was for the young'uns reading this ;-)

One other important machine usually involved in a run was a collator, not to mention a WOPR-like 602 or 604 filled with glowing tubes if you actually needed to do any multiplication or division...

1950's equivalent of an 8087 ;-) :

 

[Chuck(G)]

I knew about the 604, but never saw one "in the flesh". My impression was that it wasn't exactly cheap, so it was rare to find it in the wild. I suspect that if your computation needs were that heavy, you'd just lease a 650.

 

[woodchips]

Thanks for all the input.

Was a bit rushed, blood to the head mostly lifting them, so never took any photos. Will do so when next back at my workshop.

Wondered what the flat bit at the front was for, a typewriter keyboard, obvious really. Mine haven't got that otherwise I definitely couldn't have lifted it.

 

[MikeS]

Thanks for all the input.

Was a bit rushed, blood to the head mostly lifting them, so never took any photos. Will do so when next back at my workshop.

Wondered what the flat bit at the front was for, a typewriter keyboard, obvious really. Mine haven't got that otherwise I definitely couldn't have lifted it.

Sorry, we went a little off topic there with our nostalgic ruminations...

Do they run? Do they have a removable program panel at the rear of the carriage?

What are your plans?

 

[m_thompson]

The Rhode Island Computer Museum has one of those really wide consoles in the previous post on their B800.
http://www.ricomputermuseum.org/Home/equipment/burroughs-b800

 

[MikeS]

The Rhode Island Computer Museum has one of those really wide consoles in the previous post on their B800.
http://www.ricomputermuseum.org/Home/equipment/burroughs-b800

Nice! Is it complete and running?

In a slightly different class, but I guess you could call it the B80's big brother; definitely one of the last, if not the last ledger card capable computers.