In the 1960s, the company introduced a range of mainframe computers that were well regarded for their performance running high level languages.

At that time the emergence of superminicomputers and the dominance of the IBM System/360 and 370 at the high end led to shrinking markets, and in 1986 the company purchased former competitor Sperry UNIVAC and merged their operations to form Unisys.

The numbers entered and the final total were printed on a roll of paper at the rear, so there was no danger of the operator writing down the wrong answer and there was a copy of the calculation which could be checked later if necessary.

The Class 2 machine, called the "duplex" and built in the same basic style, provided a means of keeping two separate totals.

These machines provided a significant improvement over the older models because operators could view the printing on the paper tape.

Later models continued to be released with the P600 and top-of-the-range P612 offered some limited programmability based upon the position of the movable carriage.

It could store 9, 18 or 27 balances during the ledger posting operations and worked with a mechanical adder named a Crossfooter.

The Sensimatic developed into the Sensitronic which could store balances on a magnetic stripe which was part of the ledger card.

In 1968[5] the L and TC series range was produced (e.g. the TC500—Terminal Computer 500) which had a golf ball printer and in the beginning a 1K (64 bit) disk memory.

These were popular as branch terminals to the B5500/6500/6700 systems, and sold well in the banking sector, where they were often connected to non-Burroughs mainframes.

"[6] By 1972 when GE and RCA were no longer in the mainframe business, the remaining five companies behind IBM became known as the BUNCH, an acronym based on their initials.

Their machine instruction sets favored one or many high level programming languages, such as ALGOL, COBOL or FORTRAN.

Burroughs built the backbone switching systems for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) which sent its first message in 1977.