This company lasted from 1886 building adding machines to 1986 when it got merged with another company to form Unisys, which I guess didn't do so well after that. That's a 100-year-old computer company! Some company records were stored in UMN, would be interesting to dig into that sometime: http://discover.lib.umn.edu/cgi/f/findaid/findaid-idx?c=umfa...
Also important to know that Dijkstra was a Burroughs research fellow. Must have been an amazing place to work at.
It's not that long ago I did my prototyping in wire-wrap - I still have proto boards in wirewrap sitting on my old-stuff shelf. These days we just get boards done in China and delivered in days. I think that it was largely the shift to surface mount parts that killed wirewrap as a prototyping medium
2:50 Simulation, which I assume actually means a combination of integration and unit testing.
3:52 compiler language! i.e. non-machine language
6:05 Some kind of integrated documentation process, I guess akin to rejecting commits that don't have docstrings / sphinx docs included
6:37 "production unit" I wonder if that's where the terminology of "production server" comes from
7:40 list of features including dual processors (SMP), virtual memory!
9:00 simultaneous software & hardware design process + automated wire routing magic
...
This company lasted from 1886 building adding machines to 1986 when it got merged with another company to form Unisys, which I guess didn't do so well after that. That's a 100-year-old computer company! Some company records were stored in UMN, would be interesting to dig into that sometime: http://discover.lib.umn.edu/cgi/f/findaid/findaid-idx?c=umfa...
Also important to know that Dijkstra was a Burroughs research fellow. Must have been an amazing place to work at.
More interesting stuff: http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/107105/1/oh098b5c.pdf http://www.academia.edu/1522947/Too_far_ahead_of_its_time_Ba... http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html