A notable idea of the "semantic gap" between the ideal expression of the solution to a particular programming problem, and the real physical hardware illustrated the inefficiency of current machine implementations.
The three Burroughs architectures represent solving this problem by building hardware aligned with high-level languages, so-called language-directed design (contemporary term; today more often called a "high-level language computer architecture").
The medium systems (B2000, 3000, and B4000) were aimed at the business world and executing COBOL (thus everything was done with BCD including addressing memory.)
One concession to the fact that Burroughs was primarily a supplier to business (and thus running COBOL) was the availability of BCD arithmetic in the ALU.
The initial hardware implementations were built out of the Complementary Transistor Logic (CTL) Family originally made by Fairchild Semiconductor but with the introduction of the B1955 in 1979 the series employed the more popular (and more readily obtainable) TTL logic family.
This first cycle was decoded by FPLAs using 16 inputs (just the perfect size for a 16-bit instruction word) and 48 min-terms.
The B1955 and B1965 could accommodate up to four processors on the memory bus, but at least one of these would be assigned to the Multi-Line adapter which supplied serial I/O to the system.
The Multi-Line Adapter would DMA the data into main memory in a linked list format.
In these days of multiple gigabytes that sounds fairly limiting, but most commercial installations got by with hundreds of kilobytes of storage.