Burroughs B5000

In 1961 Burroughs introduced the B5000. Many new hardware/software computing ideas were implemented in this system. One of B5000 selling points was that it offered "higher level" programming languages (ALGOL and COBOL) as the human interface to the system. At the time, this was seen as a novelty, since very few higher level languages had been implemented. Burroughs, ignored FORTRAN (which was steadily gaining market share), and decided to go with what they thought was the "better" language--ALGOL. The B5000 hardware concerns were designed with ALGOL in mind, and this led the designers to create a machine where compilers worked fast, and execution of the object code took advantage of the structure of the object code.