Burroughs B5500

It was just one year after the first B5000 customer delivery that IBM announced the System/360, and four months later (August 1964) Burroughs responded with its announceme nt of the B5500. Even though it was not his product, Irven Travis, director of the Defense, Space, and Special Systems group (otherwise known as the Great Valley Laboratories) near Paoli in suburban Philadelphia had been very impressed with the potential of the B5000 and convinced Burroughs Corporation president Ray Macdonald to authorize work on an improved version. The circuitry of the B5500 was three times faster than that of the B5000, and this increase in speed, coupled with the use of disks in place of drums, made the B5500 a success for the company. To improve the performance of COBOL programs, the B5500 added hardware instructions for addition and subtraction of decimal fields. Burroughs also adjusted to the reality of the marketplace and provided a FORTRAN compiler for the B5500.