[t1m]

My “first” computer at home was a Burroughs B80. My Dad bought it for his accounting business in the late 70s. It was about the size of two dishwashers, had an 8in floppy, a built in printer and a small flatscreen display (orange on black characters) on a swing arm above the keyboard.

I remember flipping through the B80’s manuals and finding a software section. We could get games for it! I asked dad if we could order some, but unfortunately, he said, the accounting software supplier would void their warrantee if we were to install any other software on the machine.

All of my computer time before buying our Apple ][+ a few years later was spent “playing” data entry on the B80 for Dad’s business.

[Starwatcher2001]

Hey, I used one of those in an accountants in the early 80's, with the same weird orange and black screen. I recall there being no "enter" key, but several keys marked OCK1, OCK2.. etc (Operators Control Key). That was a good piece of design rather than a single "Ctrl" key on other machines.

I swear that printer could be heard several streets away!

We had a hard disk cabinet that took "cassette packs" with disk platters in them (maybe 15 inches in diameter). The engineer used to have to come out to it and re-align the heads every couple of weeks as they were not very stable.

I didn't realise there were games for it, dammit. I managed to get hold of a Cobol compiler for it, but with no other technical information about the B80, didn't get very far. No internet in those days kids.

I can't recall if the B80 had it, but there were small satellite workstations that looked similar and had a small silver button under the desk at exactly knee height. On my first day I was introduced to the "shit button". So named because if you accidentally knocked it, it reset the machine and lost all your work. Most people taped a small cover over it.

Fond memories of the B80, and it's big brother the B800 which I used at a different job. Boy was that sophisticated... it needed a paper tape through a "rat trap" to boot it.

[acqq]

> I recall there being no "enter" key, but several keys marked OCK1, OCK2.. etc (Operators Control Key). That was a good piece of design rather than a single "Ctrl" key on other machines.

I was even more impressed with the existence of "Go" key (allowing to signal the successful end of the form entry and to start the action, which was different than just using "enter" to end the entering of one field) on the Burroughs 20 line (with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_Technologies_Operat... ). It's making a lot of endings of "dialogs" much more logical, as well as the movement through the fields -- enter is just moving to the next field, not ending the dialog or doing whatever is selected, like in Windows.

Keyboard:

https://www.smbaker.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/03...

From:

https://www.smbaker.com/restoring-a-convergent-technologies-...