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From: rminnich@udel.EDU (Ron Minnich)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.edu,comp.lsi
Subject: Re: Comp. Architecture survey (long) summary
Message-ID: <2345@louie.udel.EDU>
Date: 2 May 88 14:35:06 GMT
References: <3952@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> <8025@ames.arpa>
Reply-To: rminnich@udel.EDU (Ron Minnich)
Distribution: na
Organization: University of Delaware
Lines: 21
Keywords: course texts, fundamental topics/issues

In article <8025@ames.arpa> eugene@pioneer.UUCP (Eugene N. Miya) writes:
>(7 votes) Burroughs 1700/1800, 5000/5500, B5500, B6700, B7700
>-- commerical stack machine, higher level language programming
>a whopping 50 copies if I remember correctly(that number may actually
  Just one comment here, the 17/18 series was quite a different
machine from the 5/6/7 series. In fact the 17/18 was quite a 
departure for Burroughs, as it was a 'user-level' microprogrammable
machine, and supported a Cobol set, a Fortran set, and others.
   When i worked at Burroughs i was told that the machine was 
deliberately crippled so that it would not put the 4x machines 
out of business (sound familiar?). The clock was cut and a couple
other things done so that 4xxx machines would not lose sales. 
The machine was orphaned almost from the start. Kind of a shame.
   At some point there was supposed to be an effort to build
a C set whether RISC-y or not i don't know. This was before RISC
so i doubt it. The project died when Burroughs killed a lot of
projects in the early 1980s.
ron
P.S. The 4xxx machines were BCD with cobol support instructions.
-- 
ron (rminnich@udel.edu)