Talk:NCR Corporation

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[edit] Missing a LOT of important product information

I worked for NCR Corporation as a Field Engineer in what might be consider its heyday, the 1970s, prior to its being acquired by AT&T, when the entire Point Of Sale field devolved into cheap PC-based systems.

My main area of expertise was their mechanical and electronic cash registers, and I worked on just about everything that was in use at the time. None of the products I worked on, or the products my peers worked on, are even mentioned in the above article.

Here are some worthy of note, in roughly chonological order.

The work "class" is used because the various models could be configured in various ways depending on the intendede use. For example, a department store model was very different from a restaurant model.

Mechanical cash registers:

100 Class -- probably the last of the manual, uncranked cash registers, powered by the keys themselves. Sometimes seen in movies. Direct descendent of the fancy antiques.

Class 21,22 and 24 -- electric, very popular, usually seen in restaurants, commonly seen in movies.

Class 51, 52, 53 -- popular in department stores and businesses needing more functionality than the 21/22/24 series. The 53 had a credit card reader and produced a computer-read printed journal paper tape.

Class 5 -- probably the most sophisticated and complex mechanical cash register ever made. Programmed with sliding metal plates. The design could easily have been modified to make it a general-purpose, if limited, mechanical computer in the vein of Babbage's Difference Engine. I've alwasy felt they deserved more recognition in the history of computing.

The class 5 was apparently related to a Class 3, which I've never seen, and which was apparently used in Europe. I don't believe NCR produced any new mechanical cash registers after the Class 5.

Electronic Cash Registers:

Some of the early ones were very sensitive to electrical noise and static electricity. I never could figure out what they used as CPUs, but they preceeded personal computers and showed no similarity to them. Plugging a bar blender into the same outlet as the bar cash register cause very unreliable operation. In the early days, non-volatile RAM chips were not available, and expensive magnetic core memory or large internal batteries were used to retain data. In most cases they had 1KB to 4KB of RAM, all of it non-volatile.

Class 220 -- freestanding, common in small retail outlets, had big lead-acid Gell Cell batteries to hold data in case of power faillure.

Class 250 -- a powerful register that replaced the Class 5 in clothing stores, bars, etc.

Class 255 -- used similar components to the 250 and 280, but with little or no autonomy. It was completely dependent on a back-office 726 computer which used the 605 processor (see below).

Class 280 -- the most common department store computer. Worked semi-autonomously, communicating via 40kbps direct current terminal-demand connection to store level concentrators which linked to 725 controller and from there to a NCR Century mainframe.

Class 285 -- a variation on the 280 used in banks, credit unions, and the like.

Accounting Systems:

I did't work on these, so can't speak knowledgeably about them.

Computers:

605 -- a 16-bit processor used in the Class 399 accounting system, the 721 and 723 communication controllers, the 725 department store level controller, the 726 retail controller, and others, including several of NCR's general-purpose minicomputers. The CPU alone comprised of four TTL circuit boards, each about 10 inches by 14 inches (as I recall), plus separate circuit boards for memory, communnications, etc. The clock cycle was 400 nanoseconds, and most instructions executed in one or two clock cycles. The instruction set was optimized for communication, and was somewhat comparable to Motorola's 68000 series chips. I'm biased, but I always thought it was well-designed and deserved more recognition.

The 605-based minis stick in my mind as being the first time I ever played a computerized version of Star Trek, a game played using "ASCII graphics" on 24x80 text terminals. Not sure where it originated. It eventually showed up on DOS-based PCs. Also, NCR's IMOS Cobol manual was the best I ever encountered.

Century series -- I know little about these, but I believe they competed with some of IBM's smaller systems.

Some general comments:

The previous reference to NCR paper (marketed as No Carbon Required) needs detail. NCR paper was developed by NCR based on their development of micro-encapsulation technology. This technology was a key to a number of other uses, including timed-release medication, etc. At the time it was developed, I don't believe the risks of PCBs were known.

NCR played a part in the Wright Brothers' success, helping with their construction of wind tunnels and so on. The naming of the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base backs this up, and there are examples to be seen in the Dayton air museum.

[edit] Why AT&T bought NCR

I'm not sure how to incorporate this into the article, but one of the main reasons that AT&T bought NCR was that AT&T desperately needed a sales force.

Before AT&T was split up in 1984, it had a captive market for its products, the local telephone companies, which were all wholly-owned subsidiaries. Thus, its marketing strategy was what has sometimes been described as the Field of Dreams scheme: "If you build it, they will come". After the divestiture, the telcos could buy from anyone and did. Northern Telecom, for example, had a telephone operator console that was almost as good as AT&T's OSPS at about half the price, so the telcos bought from Northern Telcom.

The leadership at AT&T realized that they needed to get a sales force really quickly, so they snapped up NCR in a hostile takeover. They figured that NCR's product line was not that dissimilar to their own (especially since both companies made minicomputers). What they didn't realize was that the NCR company culture was so different from AT&Ts that integrating the two was extremely difficult, and many of the NCR people resented AT&T. It was not a marriage made in heaven. Jhobson1 13:26, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] First mass storage

The article currently says, "In 1962, NCR introduced the NCR-315 Electronic Data Processing System which included the CRAM storage device, the first mass storage alternative to magnetic tape." I've figured out what you mean - automated storage for non-volatile data not used in any current job; comparable devices were automated mag tape reel or mag tape cartridge libraries, e.g. IBM 3850. The problems with the current phrasing are: mass storage takes a different view, including disks as well as tapes and thus giving the impression of referring to something smaller whose contents would all be online at the same time; "... alternative to magnetic tape ..." in the current article gives the same impression. I'm changing the phrasing to "the first automated mass storage alternative to magnetic tape libraries accesed manually by computer operators." Philcha (talk) 12:27, 25 November 2007 (UTC)