Editing Burroughs Large Systems (section)

==Background==
Founded in the 1880s, Burroughs was the oldest continuously operating company in computing ([[Elliott Brothers (computer company)|Elliott Brothers]] was founded before Burroughs, but did not make computing devices in the 19th century). By the late 1950s its computing equipment was still limited to electromechanical [[accounting machine]]s such as the [[Burroughs Sensimatic|Sensimatic]]. It had nothing to compete with its traditional rivals [[IBM]] and [[NCR Corporation|NCR]], who had started to produce larger-scale computers, or with recently founded [[Univac]]. In 1956, they purchased [[ElectroData Corporation]] and rebranded its design as the B205.

Burroughs' first internally developed machine, the B5000, was designed in 1961 and Burroughs sought to address its late entry in the market with the strategy of a completely different design based on the most advanced computing ideas available at the time. While the B5000 architecture is dead, it inspired the B6500 (and subsequent B6700 and B7700). Computers using that architecture were{{citation needed|date=September 2020}} still in production as the [[Unisys]] ClearPath Libra servers which run an evolved but compatible version of the [[Burroughs MCP|MCP]] operating system first introduced with the B6700. The third and largest line, the B8500,<ref name=Da8500/><ref name=burroughs3g/> had no commercial success. In addition to a proprietary [[CMOS]] processor design, Unisys also uses Intel [[Xeon]] processors and runs [[Burroughs MCP|MCP]], [[Microsoft Windows]] and [[Linux]] operating systems on their Libra servers; the use of custom chips was gradually eliminated, and by 2018 the Libra servers had been strictly commodity Intel for some years.