Vendor lineage
Unisys - computing's oldest bloodlines
Burroughs (1886) plus Sperry's UNIVAC - the ENIAC creators' company - merged in 1986: the deepest lineage in this section, still running ClearPath descendants today.
Unisys is where computing's two oldest commercial bloodlines meet: William Seward Burroughs's 1886 adding-machine company, and Sperry's UNIVAC division - built on Eckert and Mauchly, the engineers of ENIAC itself, whose UNIVAC I of 1951 was America's first commercial computer and famously called the 1952 election on CBS. The 1986 merger created Unisys; the mainframe heritage survives in ClearPath.
The profile traces both trunks - the adding machine and ENIAC - through the 1986 merger, the services pivot, and the modern company.
Founding stories
Unisys (Burroughs + Sperry merger)
Unisys is where computing's two oldest commercial bloodlines converge. One trunk begins in 1886 with William Seward Burroughs's adding machine - office calculation as an industry - and grows into the audacious B5000 of 1961, a stack-architecture, ALGOL-native machine decades ahead of fashion. The other runs through ENIAC itself: J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly's company built UNIVAC I, America's first commercial computer, which famously called the 1952 election for Eisenhower on CBS while the pollsters said otherwise. Burroughs's 1986 acquisition of Sperry - the name came from an employee contest - fused the trunks into Unisys.
The timeline
- The adding machine
William Seward Burroughs patents his printing adding machine in St. Louis - the oldest corporate bloodline on any page of this section, a century before the merger that carries it forward.
- UNIVAC I
Eckert and Mauchly's machine, delivered to the Census Bureau under Remington Rand, is the first commercial computer built in the United States - and in 1952 it predicts Eisenhower's landslide on live television when humans would not believe it.
- The B5000 heresy
Burroughs ships a stack machine designed for ALGOL with descriptor-based memory protection - ideas the industry spends the next three decades rediscovering; its descendants still run in ClearPath MCP.
- The merger
Burroughs completes the roughly $4.8 billion acquisition of Sperry; 'Unisys' emerges from an employee naming contest - briefly the industry's second-largest computer company, squarely in IBM's shadow.
- ClearPath: two architectures, one line
The 2200 (Sperry) and A-Series/MCP (Burroughs) heritages converge on common hardware as ClearPath - a masterclass in carrying irreplaceable installed bases forward, eventually onto x86.
- The services company
Decades of pivoting complete: Unisys today is digital-workplace, cloud, and enterprise-computing services, with ClearPath Forward still faithfully running the airline, banking, and government workloads that never got to fail.
Flagship products and solutions
- ClearPath ForwardThe continuation of both mainframe bloodlines - MCP and OS 2200 - on modern fabric, still in production where downtime is unthinkable.
- UNIVAC heritage systemsThe 1100/2200 line: five decades of compatible evolution from vacuum tubes to virtual machines.
- Digital workplace and cloud servicesThe modern revenue core: service desks, cloud migration, and enterprise security services.
Key innovations
- The commercial computer itselfUNIVAC I created the market - the idea that a business, not a laboratory, would buy a computer starts in this bloodline.
- Architecture ahead of its centuryThe B5000's stack discipline, hardware typing, and virtual-memory thinking prefigured half of modern systems design - heresy in 1961, orthodoxy now.
Main markets
Unisys sells enterprise services and ClearPath continuity worldwide - a quieter company whose two bloodlines, 1886 and ENIAC, make it the deepest lineage in this entire section.
Analyst standing
- For decades the perennial number two the mainframe evaluations set against IBM; today assessed as a focused services firm with a uniquely irreplaceable installed base.