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Historical Perspective on Today's' PC

Burroughs B80 Range

Burroughs B80

The Burroughs B80 range was introduced in about 1978.  It was intended to be the replacement for the Series L/TC range.   One of the most visible changes was that it was coloured white.  Another was that the inbuilt dot-matrix printer was enclosed under a hood, to keep down the noise level when it was printing - which also meant that the B80 could not accept visible record cards.  It was Burroughs' big step away from the Visible Record Computer, and showed the the days of the VRC were to be ended.

The B80 brought together the concepts of the small disk-based computer, that Burroughs had developed with the B700; the old principle of having everything on one desk-shaped unit; and new technology such as "floppy disks".  

The electronic keyboard was identical to that of the L9000 range, as was the inbuilt printer.  However, the basic model was equipped with a dual floppy disk drive that could take two 1-MB floppy disks.

With the B80 Burroughs launched a new operating system - CMS (Computer management System), based on the B700 operating system.  It also launched a new suite of intetrated business application software - "Key BMS".  Burroughs had developed its "BMS" (Business management System) suite of business applications for the B700 and B1700 family, and "Key BMS" was created for the B80 from this experience.

Company rumours at the time said that, with the launch of the B80 range, some of the older salespeople had decided to retire because they couldn't get their head around the big technology leap from the Series L/TC with 64KB of memory to the B80 that had 2MB of storage.   They couldn't imagine what any company could do with all that much storage!

The B80 could also accept all of the peripherals from the B700 range, including line printers, removable disk drives, fixed disk drives, etc.

If you have anything to add to these pages: Send mail to BurroughsEquipment[at]emcarthur[dot]com with questions or comments about this web site.

Last modified:11 January 2008

Photo Gallery B80 Range

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