Weather maps from Unisys, a piece of Plymouth's icy heritage

Posted on Mon, Jan 4, 2010 : 9:18 a.m.

Weather maps from Unisys, a piece of Plymouth's icy heritage

By Edward Vielmetti

Please don't complain about the cold unless you're in Minnesota.

Courtesy of Unisys

One in a series of maps from around the net, showing what you can see about the area from various perspectives.

Today's map is a current temperature gradient map provided by Unisys Weather. It shows in pleasant tones just how warm or cold - today, mostly cold - it is across the country.

The Unisys weather data includes temperature, wind chill, barometric pressure and jet stream indicators, and has current and up to 12 hour historical information. It's based on their NOAAPORT platform, which takes in a full digital feed of weather satellite data and processes it on a Solaris or Linux system for local use.

The Unisys name will be familiar to some local technology folks; it's the corporate name of the company that acquired the old-line computer manufacturer Burroughs, which had a plant in Plymouth. The Plymouth Historical Museum has a collection of records about this former adding machine plant which opened in March of 1938. The photographs in that collection include "Mgr. Lorenz next to an ice sculpture in “B” shape (Acc. #1939.04)", and there are newspaper clippings and some company newsletters in that set.

I don't know if there are going to be any ice sculptures in a "B" shape for the Plymouth Ice Festival, an ice carving display in Plymouth on Jan 23-25.

Comments

BrianR

Wed, Jan 6, 2010 : 8:35 p.m.

Actually, Ed, Burroughs was not acquired by Unisys. Unisys was the name given to the company that resulted from a corporate merger between Burroughs and Sperry. The Burroughs Plymouth Plant is historically interesting for two reasons. First, it was designed by Albert Kahn and secondly, because Burroughs manufactured the Norden bombsight there during WWII.