Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!mtunx!ihlpa!ihnp4!upba!eecae!dsacng1!dlscg1!dlsc1032
From: dlsc1032@dlscg1.UUCP (Alan Beal)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: stack machines (Burroughs)
Keywords: RISC, real-time
Message-ID: <370@dlscg1.UUCP>
Date: 7 Jun 88 18:50:53 GMT
References: <1521@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <1532@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <476@pcrat.UUCP> <2868@louie.udel.EDU>
Organization: Defense Logistics Services Center
Lines: 43


In article <2868@louie.udel.EDU>, rminnich@udel.EDU (Ron Minnich) writes:
> Well, the fact that burroughs was behind the state of the art does
> not imply that it was worse than IBM, near as i can tell. I used the
> MCP a lot, and yes it had lots of things even then that I would
> like to see on Unix now; nevertheless it was far behind the
> state of the art by 1975 or so.
> ...
> But all the market surveys indicated that the B-series and A-series
> were not going to set the world on fire sales-wise, and in fact
> would be a decreasing share of the market. 

At my place of employment, we have 4 B7800's and I would say from my
experience that the problem with Burroughs is not its hardware but its
lack of development in software.  After all, most application programmers
and end-users are not too concerned whether the architecture is stack based
or not, but are more concerned with the software capabilities of the system.
Burroughs still has not come out with a relational database package(SIM is a
semantic database sitting on top of DMSII, not relational) and DMSII does not
support SQL.  Also, the number of software vendors out there writing software
for Burroughs machines is dismal at best.  This is too bad since Algol is a
nice development language even though it does not support data strucutures
other than arrays.

The B7800 is no longer being produced and the current software release(3.6) will
be its last.  Our main problem with this machine is the lack of addressable
memory - 2**20 words or 6 Mb.  Our course, this has been solved with the
ASD memory in the A series machines.  With ASD memory, a program is limited
to 1024K data structures where a data structure is a file, database, array,etc.
An array is limited to 2**32 words.

I would argue that the MCP is a fairly sophisticated operating system that is 
fairly easy to work with.  For example, multitasking and inter-program
communication are easy to program.  Algol is the predominant systems
programming language and there is little need to learn machine code.  I have
always felt that if Burroughs had developed UNIX, the world would be turning to
Algol instead of C as the language of choice.

-- 
Alan Beal   DLSC-ZBC                 Autovon    932-4160
Defense Logistics Services Center    Commercial (616)961-4160
Battle Creek, MI 49015               FTS        552-4160
UUCP:  {uunet!gould,cbosgd!osu-cis}!dsacg1!dlscg2!abeal