Victor A. Garcia Sep 14, 2002, 12:51:19 AM Oh yes, the good old times.....let's see if I can remember the whole series, I started working in calculators, L2/5/8000, B700, nowadays I work in everything from desktop PC's to NX6830's. B700 core memory, max 32KBy, yes kilobytes, most customers only had 16 installed. B800 IC memory and DC processor, can run native B700 MCP or CMS. B80 the B800 cpu made on four chips the 'fried eggs ones' the console (Print and keyboard) was same as the L9000, without the mag stripe ledger mechanics, the display was the 'self-scan' (TD700 screen),it ran CMS and a L's emulator on cassette. B90 same as the B80 but at higher integration density and smaller print unit, it was about a quarter the size of the B80 and 3 times as powerful. Last one to emulate the L's. B900 more integrated and multiprocessor, up to 7 cpu's still running CMS, no more mechanical console, a TD830 was standard. B9250, B9550, B974 was really the same machine with specialized DC functions. From that on the CMS OS was carried over to the B1800 series, B19XX up to the last one the B1965/95, the GEM aka Goleta Ending Machine, I helped disassemble the last one in Tampa circa 1998. The B874 was unrelated to the B800, it was a pure front-end for DC on medium systems, there were customized versions for special purposes, like the B875, a dual B874 for SWIFT. --- Larry Glamb Sep 16, 2002, 10:19:06 AM Don't forget the L7000 with disk memory instead of ram. One of the fanciest coding forms I've ever seen. Circular so you could optimize placement of the next instruction. Also wasn't the B80 running CMS over SL5? -- Mitchell Fisher Sep 16, 2002, 12:33:45 PM >It looked a lot like a desk. You'd sit down at it and there was a >keyboard in front of you (blue keys on a black surface, with some >special function keys in addition to what you'd see on a typewriter) and >just beyond it the printing part which held wide (computer, 14 7/8") >paper. The "works" were in one of the sides (white in color), and I >think there was a tape cassette drive and some sort of disk, probably an >8" minidisc. They might have also had some sort of display, possibly the >8 line by 40 character "self scan" orange-colored display like the TD700 >terminal. If I recall the target market, it was sold to do accounting >applications at places that might have previously used the Burroughs "L" >series accounting machine. They did run CMS like the B800, but had the >aforementioned form factor. I think that the B80 was done in Cumbernauld >Scotland and Plymouth Michigan and that the B800 was from somewhere in >Pennsylvania; Downingtown, maybe. Yeah, the B800's and B900's were made in Downingtown. The CP9500 was a B900 with a different skin and sold as a datacom front end (and only the low profile cabinet, I think). My favorite memory about the B800 was that whenever I opened the disk cabinet door if I let it touch a chair it set off a static discharge that re-booted the machine. And those removable disk platters that held a whopping 1MB! I liked programming in MPLII and later Blaise. -Mitch -- Victor A. Garcia Sep 16, 2002, 5:28:16 PM I believe the L8000 was the first one with RAM, the L2/5/6/7000 all had the memory disk, they were head-per-track, that's why it was easy to figure the placement of the next instruction and optimize it so it will not require a full revolution of the platter. The platter motor was bigger than the one in most modern washing machines, common failure was dropping the belt that joined motor and platter. The logic backplane had pins that were jumpered to allow Write access for each track, so if the disk was corrupted, the FE had to bring the set of jumpers, install them and reload the OS from paper punched tapes, verify it works, then remove the jumpers to make it ROM instead of RAM, the User tracks were always R/W. Sometimes, we forgot to remove the jumpers, and the machines ran for years with the OS part wide open for overwrite, very few times that happens, a tribute to the quality of the programmers of that era. Maybe M$ should train their people on one L2000, before letting them mess with Windows code. I try to remember CMS was entirely MPLII, but the hardware was capable to run SL5, we use to have the emulator in a cassette, load it and play Golf and Lunar Lander on the B80, the B90 was unable to play Golf, since the printer (console) was not compatible with the L's one. -- Ian Dalziel Sep 17, 2002, 2:54:37 AM > Also wasn't the B80 running CMS over SL5? > Certainly wasn't native SL5 - I was still working in SL5 when it appeared. Might have been SL9 - I've slept since then. -- Victor A. Garcia Sep 21, 2002, 11:52:55 PM It was Systems Research International. The use of Tape Controllers/DLP's was force upon third party developers, since it was the only Burroughs interface that was truly Open, published and warranty by the company to stay that way, so a lot of products from other companies used it to there were always to channels declared, TapeIN, and TapeOUT, but most of the time they connect to a single DLP. Macro use to sell one for Large systems, it was a PC which connect to a SCSI DLP and beat out BNA and the CP2000 for about 1/10 of the price. The B874/75, never run CMS, it never had Disk interface, just the cassette and the HT connection. The B974, did it, it was a B900 with special code for the BNA controller, other than that, it was a standard CMS machine. -- Adrian Buckmaster Sep 24, 2002, 2:23:13 AM As I remember the 'single density' removable disk was about 1.2MB, and there was a 'double density' version which held about 2.2MB (plus there was a cabinet available equipped with similar fixed disks, I don't remember the capacity). They all used *huge* solenoids to drive the heads along a radial axis, rather than arcs as used these days. It was very rare to find two double density drives with the same alignment, so it was often desirable to have the disk formatted on the end user's drive before you copied data to t - that way there was a greater likelihood of them being able to read it! There were two form factors for both B80s and B90s. B80s came in a rectangular or L-shaped desk configuration - veterans of Manchester, UK, will remember a certain story relating to an L-shaped B80 - and B90s had a normal desk size B92, and a small (by comparison) B91. B80s were usually equipped with two 1MB 8" floppy drives in an over and under configuration (the bottom one just at the right height for unwanted contamination by the factory-owner's dog!), and the B90s normally had the dual 3MB 8" floppy drive which was the same physical dimensions as an earlier 1MB drive. The 3MB drives were twinned side-by-side drives with opposite-opening aluminium flaps, electrically operated when they decided to co-operate, with slots at one side for the empty plastic outer sleeves which protected the media and were used to insert and extract the disk. I believe these were also designed to hold 5MB (and came up as a unit type of MD5 - what a give away), but the story was that the media was never reliable enough so the smaller radius (higher areal density) portion of the disk was unused. These disks came pre-formatted, and couldn't be user formatted. There were a number of tracks set aside for reallocation in place of bad sectors. Once these were full the disk became unusable. However, when you got a set of dirty heads you could permanently trash three floppies before you came to that conclusion. I never realised I was such a sad individual until you folks started me off remembering this stuff - please stop it at once! -- John Holden Sep 25, 2002, 12:57:00 AM We sold a stack of B80s to a UK bank for use as intelligent terminals connected by leased lines to the data centre. They'd have the capability to work off-line in an emergency. They were to be programmed in SL5, like the non-disk variant (the TC5000) and would probably have been just fine. Then the bank hired a consultant to advise on telecoms. He came up with the bright idea of using them as fully fledged branch systems that would work offline and send in the transaction files using a daily dial-up, thus saving a fortune in line rentals. Crucially, they'd also hold a mini account ledger that could be updated in real time and then synched once or twice a day. The bank went for this, and Burroughs came up with random access disk software for SL5. I helped the bank to figure out the fairly delphic documentation and get it all working. Things went fairly well until the second pilot, at a branch near the docks. The dust in the air made the floppy disks very unreliable. The system couldn't function without them. When the programmers ran out of space in 64K, they'd just had a B90 with 128K delivered. They used it - although if I remember correctly the address space was limited to 64K, they no longer had to include the firmware in that total. Then they found that they couldn't run their code on a B80. Things collapsed slowly into acrimony and the deal was eventually cancelled. I still have my SL3 quick reference guide which was the essential tool to be able to hand compile your SL3/5 code into hex. regards -- mike....@gmail.com Oct 30, 2014, 4:12:36 PM I was a programmer (and still am!) back in the late 70s and worked for an independent software house in Manchester England that specialised in Burroughs L-series, then CMS, then Unix (U6000 series). In the mid 80s I began working from home most of the time, having acquired (read that as scrounged) a B80 that gave me the capability to work remotely, writing lots of Cobol, MPLII and some RPGII. I went on to "acquire" further kit - another B80, then a B90, then a B900. I have quite a soft spot for the CMS machines and have downloaded a fair few manuals from http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/, though there don't seem to be any compiler manuals around. If anybody has got an MPLII (Message Processing Language) manual, I'd snatch your hand off for a copy! If anybody out there is still interested, I know quite a lot about the CMS era regarding the above small systems. For example, I "acquired" an extended memory address (XMA) processor for the first B80, so that I could increase its memory above 64k - it eventually had 256K which I believe became the highest configured B80 in the UK. I've enjoyed reading this thread and will contribute further if there are any similar-minded people out there! -- Anthony Stewart Nov 6, 2022, 12:47:07 PM I found this... "Burroughs learned from his experience with the B80 and developed the B90 range accordingly. The B90 was fully compatible with the B80. It came with a narrow printer or a large printer - and two dot matrix models. It used the CMS operating system, and also used the KeyBMS application suite. There were two key differences between the B90 and the B80. Firtsly, the B90 was faster. But secondly, the B90 introduced a 3 MB floppy disk, and the base model was equipped with a dual floppy-disk drive. The B90 could also use all peripherals from the B80 and B700 ranges. The 3 MB floppy drive was sensitive to temperature due to the relatively high density of the data stored on the disk. The drive should periodically recalibrate itself automatically for a few seconds to make sure it could continue to read and write data accurately. When it was not re-calibrated, the 3 MB floppy disk was fast. As the technology was impressive, just as a 3MB was held on an 8-inch floppy disk, and the alternative was 2.1MB held on a disk cartridge that was approximately 18-inches in diameter and 3-inches deep. The B90 range was introduced around 1980. However, Burroughs had escaped the fact that new microcomputers, such as the Apple 1 and Commodore PET, had already been used by businesses, and that they could do a lot and cost less. Apple Computer was created in 1976. IBM launched the personal computer "in the United States in 1981. In 1983, when the IBM PC was launched in Europe, Burroughs and the other top-ten computer companies of the day realized that they had been caught caught off guard. To develop a new microcomputer to compete against IBM and Apple computers would take too long, and so Burroughs (like other top-ten computer companies) went to convergent technology and re-distinguish rights to their latest desk-top computer business bought. like your own product. This became the Burroughs B20." -- Duncan Fenton Aug 16, 2022, 3:48:18 PM Hi, I was the lead developer of the CMS (internally SL9) MCP working in Cumbernauld from 1972 thru 1978. The SL9 software (MCP, compilers, utilities) was planned from the start to run on B80 (Cumbernauld), B800 (Downingtown) and B1800 (Liege) series. That was achieved by each plant writing a suite of microcoded interpreters to emulate the same virtual machine for compiled COBOL and MPL bytecodes. [This concept is now used for the Java Virtual Machine and others.] The MCP kernel was hand coded (in microcode) at each participating plant to a common spec - the "SL9 virtual machine". It was important to build a "real" MCP lookalike with commands like MX, AX, OK, DS etc. so that the field would not need a lot of training. We diverged from Burroughs MCP practice in one small way: the leading EX on the execute command was optional, so anything the MCP "didn't understand" was considered to be a program name to be executed [as nowadays in *nix]. This allowed the "outer parts" of the MCP actually to be utilities written in MPL and thus interpreted. Getting authority to create an MCP (multiprocessing OS) for a 64k byte accounting machine was a hard (internal) sell. The thesis was that these machines would have a single owner so did not need much (actually any) logging/accounting, and would run a max (on the B80) of 16 concurrent tasks. Thus we could get by with one byte instead on one 48 bit word for most OS data items. The CMS versions of the B80 (it also ran SL5 which was an L machine emulator) had a hard disk which was used for a virtual memory system as well as an MCP filing system. Designing from the ground up for multitasking and virtual memory probably saved this project multiple times both pragmatically and politically. To me the most satisfying moment was when I led a mission to Downingtown to negotiate some fine points of the SL9 VM spec. While I was being met and greeted, two software engineers I'd brought along walked over to the B800s which they had never seen, and started operating them fluently. Now /that's/ compatibility. Aside from some very talented colleagues, I would not have been able to pull this project off without a solid previous background in medium and large systems MCP support, having installed and tended both the first B3500 and first B6500/B6700 in Europe. Hope this has some interest. I note that Wikipedia has no mention of this commercially successful Burroughs product family. P.S. SL7 was the predecessor software written at Downingtown for the B800 series,