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.
Two trunks meet here. Burroughs began in 1886 with an adding machine; Sperry began in 1910 in Brooklyn making navigation equipment. Between them they reach further back into commercial computing than anything else in this section.
The line that matters ran through Eckert and Mauchly, who built ENIAC and were then forced out of the University of Pennsylvania in a patent dispute over it. They started a company to build computers, Remington Rand bought it in 1950, and the first UNIVAC went to the Census Bureau in March 1951. Forty-six were sold at over a million dollars each.
On election night in 1952, with three million votes counted, UNIVAC put Eisenhower's odds at 100 to 1 and the printout showed 00 - because the field was two digits wide and nobody had imagined an odds figure above ninety-nine. The night the computer became a household name in America, it was displaying a number it could not fit. Every later entry in this catalogue about a field that was too narrow, from the two-digit year to the thirty-two-bit timestamp, is the same mistake made again at larger scale.
Then it lost. The 1955 merger that created Sperry Rand did not support the UNIVAC team adequately, ERA was bought and set to compete with it internally, products slipped, and IBM went past. The company that shipped the first commercial computer in America was overtaken inside a decade by better marketing and steadier delivery.
That is worth putting beside the IBM entry, because IBM appears on both sides of the same pattern. Here it is the one that takes a category from the firm that created it; in its own entry it is the one that creates categories and loses them. Inventing first is a weak position, and the same company can demonstrate that from either end.
The 1986 conclusion was a hostile takeover: Burroughs bought Sperry for 4.8 billion dollars, and the name of the combined company came out of a staff naming competition that drew thousands of entries. Sperry had already retired the UNIVAC name two years earlier. What survives is the mainframe line, still shipping, and a services business - the ordinary fate of deep lineage, which is that it becomes a support contract.
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.
- Unisys was formed in 1986 through the merger of Sperry and Burroughs, Burroughs buying Sperry for 4.8 billion dollars; the lineage runs back through Remington Rand to E. Remington & Sons in 1873 and the first commercially viable QWERTY typewriter
- Computer History Museum: Remington also bought ERA in 1952, creating two rival computer divisions, and by the mid-1950s UNIVAC's lead over IBM had evaporated through poor marketing, delayed products and new models from IBM; Sperry dropped the UNIVAC name in 1984; Burroughs acquired Sperry in a 1986 hostile takeover, and the name Unisys was among thousands submitted in a naming competition
- On the 1952 election night: with just over three million votes counted UNIVAC put the odds at 100 to 1 in favour of Eisenhower, and the printout read 00 instead of 100 because the programmers had never imagined needing more than two digits; Remington Rand sold 46 machines at more than a million dollars each
- Eckert and Mauchly were forced to resign from the University of Pennsylvania in a patent dispute over ENIAC and started a company to build computers; Remington Rand acquired it in 1950, the first UNIVAC went to the Census Bureau in 1951, and the 1955 Remington Rand and Sperry merger failed to support the UNIVAC team adequately, which allowed IBM to pass them