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| Formerly |
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|---|---|
| Industry |
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| Founded | 1886 |
| Founder | William Seward Burroughs I |
| Defunct | 1986 |
| Fate | Merged with the Sperry Corporation |
| Successor | Unisys |
| Headquarters | St. Louis, Missouri, U.S. |
The Burroughs Corporation was a major American manufacturer of business equipment. The company was founded in 1886 as the American Arithmometer Company by William Seward Burroughs. The company's history paralleled many of the major developments in computing. At its start, it produced mechanical adding machines, and later moved into programmable ledgers and then computers. It was one of the largest producers of mainframe computers in the world, also producing related equipment including typewriters and printers.
In the 1960s, the company introduced a range of mainframe computers that were well regarded for their performance running high level languages. These formed the core of the company's business into the 1970s. At that time the emergence of superminicomputers and the dominance of the IBM System/360 and 370 at the high end led to shrinking markets, and in 1986 the company purchased former competitor Sperry UNIVAC and merged their operations to form Unisys.