Burroughs ICON
Sometime you discover something about a micro computer you never heard of.
In April 2022, Jason Eckert showed us Ontario’s Computer: The Burroughs ICON:
Nicknamed the bionic beaver, the ICON was a Canadian computer funded by the Ontario government and used in schools province wide.
Specially developed computers for education were a thing in the 80s. The UK had the BBC micro, which became a popular home computer, France had the Thomson MO5, which weren’t great1, and Ontario, just one Canadian province, had the ICON, and apparently it wasn’t sold on the consumer market.
Jason shows us the hardware, that seems to be designed to be robust and how it is inside. The operating system was based on QNX, another Canadian developed product.
The ICON was meant to teach programming, so it came with tools for various languages made by Watcom. Watcom was a popular C/C++ vendor for PC in the 80s and 90s.
Burroughs, the vendor, was a well known name in the world of mainframe, part of “the nine” in the 60s, the distant second behind IBM. In 1986 it merged with Sperry Corporation, another of the nine that made the UNIVAC line, to form UNISYS. UNISYS was infamous to be the GIF patent troll over LZW compression.
Nonetheless the ICON was incompatible with anything on the market.
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I am the product of the French secondary education. In the mid-80 my high school had a room with these Thomson. I remember going twice in that room (it was only with a teacher), and I don’t remember anything accomplished. One of the issue is that the teachers didn’t have the knowledge. I had more time, on a separate occasion, to get taught basic office software on MS-DOS PC. It was probably the closest I had of an actual computer class until 1993, when I finished high-school and moved on to post-secondary education. ↩︎