The B2000 series of machines was built in Pasadena, California and was aimed straight at the business world. The architecture was built to support Cobol programming in the most efficient way possible. Burroughs architectures tried to narrow the semantic gap between high level languages and the hardware these programs executed on.

The B2000-B4000 machines did everything in Binary Coded Decimal (BCD) arithmetic. Memory was addressed on BCD boundaries instead of the traditional binary boundaries. The architecture featured an instruction code set that provided for 3 register operation allowing the COBOL operation ADD A, B giving C to be directly translated into a single machine instruction.