Old Computer Companies

From: Alan Perry <alanp_at_snowmoose.com>
Date: Mon Feb 3 14:27:00 2003

>> Actually, DEC is still somewhat around -- it was absorbed into Compaq
in
>> 1997, and, of course, Compaq was absorbed into HP last year. As such,
>> HP now holds all the rights and histories to everything DEC and
Compaq.
>> DEC/Compaq provided contract on-site tech support to my current and
past
>> two retail firms. HP provides those services now, with the same (if
>> older) DEC and Compaq field techs. I still work with many of them in
my
>> current tech support position.
>
>But DEC as a company is long gone. I am *well* aware of what happened
>with the DEC -> Compaq -> HP thing.

I don't know. A friend of mine still has his DEC e-mail address.

>> And, while we're asking, does anyone know what happened to Burroughs?
>> As I left the Air Force in 1991, I was working with a cantankerous,
>> already jurassic, cobbled-together system produced by "Convergent
>> Technologies -- an abortive fusion of Burroughs and NCR. It's
"banded"
>> 512K memory board nearly neasured a square foot by 1.5" thick, and was
>> banded to *prevent* it from accessing a full 1Mb of memory.

>Burroughs and Sperry merged to form Unisys.

OK, what happened to the things that made Burroughs Burroughs? I worked
there from 1986 to 1989. The B1000 machines were EOL'ed when I got
there and I pretty much had the B1965 at Lake Forest (Orange Co., CA) to
myself doing support for HOSTLINK and GEMCOS. I think Art Sorkin (Mr.
B1000 MCP) had one in Mission Viejo doing MCP support. I never cared
much for the Pasadena machines (the V-Series or Medium systems) and I
don't know when they were EOL'ed. There was a lot of B5000/Large
System/A-Series hardware development after I left, but I don't know what
happened to those machines. Is anyone still commercially running any of
this hardware?

I am not sure which CT machines you are talking about or if you have the
full story on CT. When I joined Burroughs, they were selling a line of
desktop computer called B20 (even though there were B3x machines).
These machines were made by CT and ran an OS called BTOS (a variant on
CT's own CTOS). They were kinda cool because the form factor for each
component was something like a 10" tall by 10" deep by 4" wide box
(called a 'slice') and you added slices together (say, a CPU slice, a
display slice and a disk slice) to make a working computer.

alan
Received on Mon Feb 03 2003 - 14:27:00 GMT