High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Burroughs B2000 series of computers was manufactured by Burroughs Corporation in Pasadena, California, United States, and was aimed straight at the business world. The architecture was built to support COBOL programming in the most efficient way possible, it was designed to narrow the semantic gap between high level languages and the hardware these programs executed on. The instruction set provided for 3 register operation allowing the COBOL operation ADD A, B GIVING C to be directly translated into a single machine instruction, this simplicity encouraged many customers to program their systems in assembler rather than a high-level language. This approach went to the lengths of providing single machine operation codes for "translate this buffer through this (e.g. EBCDIC to ASCII) conversion table into that buffer" or "sort this table using these sort requirements into that table", extreme instances of which were capable of running for several hundredths of a second.