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Remington Rand and Burroughs badges?

dmemphis

dmemphis

Experienced Member
Joined
Oct 4, 2014
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Location
Pottstown, PA
This component, said to be a rack mount flip flop of the UNIVAC I, has both
Remington Rand and Burroughs badges. Can anyone explain what is
going on here?
 

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  • UNIVAC I FlipFlop Burroughs.jpg
    UNIVAC I FlipFlop Burroughs.jpg
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Unisys did not purchase Sperry. Sperry Univac and Burroughs merged to then later become Unisys. I worked at Sperry Univac at this time.
 
I always thought Unisys (Burroughs and Univac) bought Sperry in the 80s, good to know!
 
twolazy said:
I always thought Unisys (Burroughs and Univac) bought Sperry in the 80s, good to know!
Click to expand...
No it was a merger of two totally different architecture types of machines that supported two totally different markets. I never understood why. But Mike Blumenthal made it happen and made lots of money from it and then moved to France. After the merger of two 60k employee companies they layed off many. I never really expected it to survive. The stocks of both companies were in the 60s. After the merger the stock dropped to the 20s, and eventually went down to $2 or $3. Now Unisys makes no computer (no 1100s or B series or V series).
 
tradde said:
No it was a merger of two totally different architecture types of machines that supported two totally different markets. I never understood why. But Mike Blumenthal made it happen and made lots of money from it and then moved to France. After the merger of two 60k employee companies they layed off many. I never really expected it to survive. The stocks of both companies were in the 60s. After the merger the stock dropped to the 20s, and eventually went down to $2 or $3. Now Unisys makes no computer (no 1100s or B series or V series).
Click to expand...
Is there a book about that period? A few years back I discovered that Unisys was making an MCP emulator available for student use and signed up to get a copy, but it's since been discontinued. Did they move entirely in to software virtualization?
 
I am really not sure what Unisys makes to sell anymore. It might be some virtualized stuff. I think they may be a 3rd party that puts together various components or systems to make them useful to their customers. Burroughs was big with banks, and Sperry was more with supplying hardware to the government? Their two architectures couldn't have been more different.
 
Yeah, JPL was a big Univac 1100-series FORTRAN customer in the 1970s and 1980s.

Fieldata, ugh.

In the 1970s, I remember that we at CDC had our eye on Burroughs for the BSP--a sort of stripped-down ILLIAC-IV. By the time they got the lab prototype halfway working, the world had passed them by.

I guess the same fate befell the TI ASC.
 
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They survive based on the dusty deck data centers built around them. It doesn't matter much what physical hardware it runs on as long as the institutional processes stay the same

High performance computing is a completely different world. They change programming paradigms to whatever lets them produce answers faster or over bigger datasets.
I was doing some research recently on the big file storage systems LLNL developed in the 70's and 80's connected with the Octopus network and its decendents.
Fun stuff that doesn't have much released information.

Neither Burroughs or TI were ever big players there. There were only a couple of ASCs ever built and they were in dedicated TI data centers. BSP came out of Burroughs' Federal
Systems Division. Some info on both systems on bitsavers.

Fieldata was a military thing that came out of the late 50s and wasn't just from Univac
 
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Al Kossow said:
I was doing some research recently on the big file storage systems LLNL developed in the 70's and 80's connected with the Octopus network and its decendents.
Click to expand...
Do you mean IBM 1360 Photostore? That was anathema to a lot of users at Livermore. There was a policy that any online files not accessed within a certain period would be shuffled off to Photostore. Retrieving them was quite another matter and not always successful. There were bootleg programs in use to periodically touch all of a user's files to keep them from being Photostored. Talk about a Rube Goldberg bit of gear.
I showed up a LLNL periodically for STAR-100 access in the early 1970s. I had my Q clearance, so I didn't need to be chaperoned to go to the bathroom...
 
Chuck(G) said:
Do you mean IBM 1360 Photostore?
Click to expand...
several generations of the later stuff as well. the whole PDP-10 roll-in roll-out system with baked-in security,
tape robots, and the unix-based system after that. CHM ended up with much of the stuff from the Livermore
computer museum, as well as a tape robot full of degaussed reels.
we ended up with their photostore

Catalog Search | Computer History Museum

www.computerhistory.org www.computerhistory.org
 
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Steve Toner said:
Could the Remington Rand sticker be an asset tag? Maybe they owned a Burroughs machine?
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This could be. I had been puzzled that I didn't see anything like this in photos of the UNIVAC I. Information we have about this box says the pieces we have are UNIVAC I, but I am doubting that now. I'm thinking like you- the Burroughs badge inicates its burroughs construct, and Remmington asset. I'm going to do a complete photo set and post it here.
 
tradde said:
No it was a merger of two totally different architecture types of machines that supported two totally different markets. I never understood why. But Mike Blumenthal made it happen and made lots of money from it and then moved to France. After the merger of two 60k employee companies they layed off many. I never really expected it to survive. The stocks of both companies were in the 60s. After the merger the stock dropped to the 20s, and eventually went down to $2 or $3. Now Unisys makes no computer (no 1100s or B series or V series).
Click to expand...
I was there, part of Burroughs SDC, left right after the merger.
 
One other fun tidbit. Unisys had competing smaller systems that basically did the same things from the Burroughs side and the Sperry side. This caused some folk to dislike folk on the other side. I never quite got that. And one of these systems they took to just about the introduction point and then cancelled it at the last minute. Seems odd and a waste of money. Guess it was marketing driven. Others were not even wanted by customers after being asked. Then why were they developed if there was no need? Once, again marketing thought it would be wanted.
 
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