Unisys
| Unisys Corporation
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|---|---|
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| legal form | Corporation |
| ISIN | US9092143067 |
| founding | September 16, 1986 Eldest forerunner: 1927 Remington Rand |
| Seat | Blue Bell , United States |
| management | Peter Altabef, CEO |
| Number of employees | 20,000 |
| sales | 2,742,000,000 US dollars |
| Branch | Information technology |
| Website | www.unisys.com |
| As of December 31, 2017 | |
Unisys is an IT service provider. The company has long been a hardware manufacturer , but has switched its focus to services since 1990.
The company's headquarters are in Blue Bell ( Pennsylvania ) in the northeastern United States .
Unisys has offices in over 100 countries and employs around 20,000 people worldwide.
history
Unisys emerged from a merger of Sperry Corporation and Burroughs Corporation . The merger was known back then as the dinosaur wedding in the computer science industry. Burroughs bought Sperry on May 27, 1986 for $ 4.8 billion. The two companies merged on September 16, 1986. This made Unisys the second largest IT service provider in the world at the time. The name Unisys ( Un ited I nformation Sys tems) was found in an in-house competition. The future name "Unisys" for the new company was announced on November 10th. The merger was initiated by W. Michael Blumenthal .
The roots of Unisys go back to the year 1816 to the company Remington Arms - E. Remington & Sons , which brought the first commercially usable typewriter (Remington) onto the market. In 1925 she produced the first electric typewriter. Remington Rand was formed in 1927 out of the Remington Typewriter Company , the Rand Kardex Company , and the Powers Accounting Machine Company . Among other things, typewriters were manufactured, including the first with a QWERTY keyboard. Remington later made adding machines. In 1950, Remington Rand bought Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation .
The Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, founded by J. Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly , developed one of the world's first digital computers , the ENIAC . After the acquisition, the ENIAC was further developed with the product lines UNIVAC and UNIVAC I and UNIVAC 1100/2200 . In 1952, the UNIVAC was used to predict the victory of Dwight D. Eisenhower in the US presidential election . Eckert stayed with Remington Rand, later Sperry and Unisys, and held a managerial position in the company. In 1989 Eckert left Unisys , but was still available to the company as a consultant.
Remington Rand was strengthened by the acquisition of Engineering Research Associates (ERA) with the expertise in drum memory , a forerunner of hard disk drives . On this basis, Remington Rand further developed the UNIVAC computer series. Seymour Cray and William C. Norris were among others involved in the development of the UNIVAC series.
In 1955 Sperry acquired Remington Rand and renamed itself Sperry Rand .
With the UNIVAC, Sperry Rand belonged to the group of manufacturers who competed with IBM with mainframes under the acronym BUNCH (for Burroughs , UNIVAC, NCR , CDC and Honeywell ) in the 1960s and 1970s . UNIVAC computers were particularly successful with aviation companies that operated their booking systems on them.
In 1978, Sperry Rand decided to focus on the computer business and sold Remington Rand Systems, Remington Rand Machines, Ford Instrument Company, Sperry Aerospace and Sperry Vickers. The word "Rand" was deleted from the name, henceforth the company was again called the Sperry Corporation. The UNIVAC division was henceforth called Sperry Univac and some time later simply Sperry .
In 1986, Sperry merged with Burroughs Corporation . The divisions of both companies were combined under the name Unisys and the two traditional names Sperry and Burroughs were given up. Sperry's other businesses such as Sperry New Holland , Sperry Gyroscope, Sperry Vickers, Sperry Marine and Sperry Flight Systems were sold after the merger.
In 1953, after purchasing ElectroData in Pasadena , California, Burroughs began manufacturing computers for banks. The first product was the computer B205 Tube . Burroughs had branches around the world, Burroughs GmbH in Germany.
In 1961 Burroughs introduced the first computer with virtual memory and dual processor, the B5000 . The Burroughs B5000 was an alternative to the S / 360 released by IBM in 1964 . With the B1700, Burroughs also developed a series of minicomputers in which each process ran on its own virtual machine .
Larry Wall was employed as an administrator and programmer at the company Unisys, where he was involved since March 1987 in developing a secure network for the NSA under the code name blacker . He received several orders to create tools for remote maintenance and monitoring of the emerging software . One of the main tasks was to generate clear reports from scattered log files . Since the existing languages and tools seemed too cumbersome for him, he developed the Perl programming language step by step with the help of his teammate at the time Daniel Faigin and his brother-in-law Mark Biggar in order to solve his tasks.
In 1988 Unisys bought Convergent Technologies and took over their CTOS operating system.
Unisys joined X / Open in 1990 and the Linux Foundation in 2004 .
2005 Unisys and NEC Corporation agree on a cooperation in the areas of server technology, research and development and production for the manufacture of Intel-based high-performance computers.
In 2006 Unisys sold its media division to Atex for $ 50 million . It also sold all shares in the Japanese subsidiary Nihon Unisys .
In 2007 Unisys ported the OS2200 ( UNIVAC ) operating system, which until then had run on specially manufactured processors, to Intel XEON processors.
Business areas
Unisys has changed from a long-established hardware manufacturer to a service provider. Mainframes and high-performance computers are still sold today, but most of the income is generated through services and software.
Services
- Enterprise security - security solutions in all areas.
- Outsourcing - Process and IT Outsourcing
- Real Time Infrastructures - Solutions in logistics and travel
- Open source solutions based on a defined open source stack
- Microsoft Solutions - Solutions in the Microsoft environment
- 3D Blueprinting - Business Consulting
Products
- Software - Various application software in the areas of finance, aviation, logistics and security.
- Enterprise Servers - Intel-based high-performance servers , ES7000
- Mainframes - Unisys based mainframes Clearpath , MCP (Burroughs) and OS2200 (UNIVAC) compatible
Sectors / Industries
- Public Sector - Offers for authorities, the judiciary and administrations.
- Financial Services - Offers for banks and insurance companies.
- Communications - Offers for the communications industry.
- Transportation - Offers for airports, air traffic control and logistics companies.
- Consumer & Industrial Products - Offers for retail and consumer goods, industry as well as life science .
Special products
Unisys developed NEXRAD (next generation radar) . The NEXRAD radar, which is based on the Doppler effect, is intended to warn airports and pilots of sudden gusts and a downburst . All airports in the USA are equipped with this system. Unisys provides weather data and uplink capacity to satellites of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration through its Transportation business unit .
Controversy
Some people know Unisys through the patent on the LZW compression algorithm , which was mainly used for the GIF graphic format . At the end of 1994 Unisys announced together with CompuServe that they wanted to enforce the patent on this compression method for GIF images as well. This not only led to an outcry in the computer science community, but also to the development of the PNG image format . The patent for the compression algorithm LZW is 2003 expired in the US, 2,004 in Europe and Asia.
Unisys was the target of an anti-corruption campaign in the defense sector in 1991 under the code name Operation Ill Wind . Unisys has been fined a heavy bribe of over $ 163 million plus costs.
literature
- David E. Lundstrom: A Few Good Men from Univac, ISBN 0-7351-0010-1
- Ralph Welborn, Vince Kasten: Get It Done! A Blueprint for Business Execution, ISBN 0-471-47931-4
- Nancy Beth Stern, From Eniac to UNIVAC: An Appraisal of the Eckert-Mauchly Computers, ISBN 0-932376-14-2
- Chris Britton, IT Architectures and Middleware: Strategies for Building Large, Integrated Systems, ISBN 0-201-70907-4
- Arthur L. Norberg, Computers and Commerce: A Study of Technology and Management at Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company, Engineering Research Associates, and Remington Rand, 1946–1957 (History of Computing), ISBN 0-262-14090-X
- Tony Morgan, Business Rules and Information Systems. Aligning IT with Business Goals, ISBN 0-201-74391-4
- James W. Cortada, Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, and Remington Rand and the Industry They Created, 1865-1956 (Studies in Business and Technology), ISBN 0-691-05045-7
Individual evidence
- ↑ Leadership
- ↑ a b Form 10-K 2017 , accessed on July 29, 2018
- ↑ Joyce A. Post: The Burroughs Research Center in Paoli ( Memento of the original from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 3.8 MB)
- ↑ Burroughs and Sperry rename their merged company "Unisys"
- ^ Unisys Corporation 2006 Annual Report. (No longer available online.) Unisys, March 13, 2007, p. 40 , formerly in the original ; accessed on August 11, 2011 . ( Page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Patent US4558302 : High speed data compression and decompression apparatus and method. Filed June 20, 1983 , published December 10, 1985 , applicant: Sperry Corporation, inventor: Terry A. Welch.
