Who is NCR?

James Ritty's "Incorruptible Cashier".

This strange looking device is actually the first working mechanical cash register with "The Bell Heard Round the World". With these machines John H. Patterson launched The National Cash Register Company in Dayton, Ohio in 1884.

Paint, polish and poster with message "Stop the forgotten charge, use a National Cash Register" were traveling advertisements for the company.

NCR's 1,000,000th machine was this Class 500 floor model cash register which was maunfactured in the Dayton plant in 1911. Charles F. Kettering added the electric motor to the cash register in 1906 before moving to General Motors to fit the electric self-starter to the Cadillac motorcar. The elegant cast brass cabinetry would disappear as the brass was needed for artillery shells during World War I and would not be seen again.

Dayton plant in 1915

By 1911 "The Cash" employed some 5,900 people and would produce their 2,000,000th unit in 1922.

The company became multi-national in 1886 and would soon be doing business in 121 countries.

The Class 2000 was introduced in 1921 and was produced in numerous forms as charge posters, bank proof and accounting machines as well as cash registers. Except for the war years, it enjoyed continious production until 1973.

In the late '50s variations of the 2000 and other models were coupled to paper tape punches to generate computer input.

Ellis Adding-Typewriter Co. was acquired and the Class 3000 accounting machine with descriptor was added to the product line in 1929. Here, Grace Kelly gives it a try.

In the years to come, accounting machines would become as important as the cash register business.

The Dayton factory in 1946 after World War II duties of manufacturing rocket motors, analog computer bomb gunsights, and the Chandler-Evans aircraft carburetor used on long range B-29 bombers.

The Japanese plant was nationalized in 1940 and the Berlin factory was destroyed.

After producing bank posting machines for nearly thirty years NCR revolutionized the banking industry.

The Class 29 Post-Tronic was an electronic bank posting machine unveiled in 1956. It provided automatic balance pickup from magnetic stripes on the backside of the ledger card, which eliminated the need for "double posting" enabling NCR to capture the lion's share of the commercial bank posting market.

During the same period NCR was instramental in the development of MICR (Magnetic Ink Character Recognition) which is the strange looking small print that appears on the bottom of all checks today, allowing the documents to be read electronically.

Partnering with General Electric produced the world's first solid state (fully transistorized) mainframe computer, the NCR 304 in 1957. The original customer delivery was to the United States Marine Corps at Camp Pendleton, California in 1959.

First month uptime was 99.3% which was amazing for 1950's technology.

The 304 was followed in 1961 by the 315 with the first mass storage device. NCR developed the Card Random Access Memory "CRAM" which utilized a removable deck of 256 magnetic cards with a high speed random access (less than 1/6 second" setting the stage for realtime processing. Each canister stored 17,000,000 characters and data was transferred at 100,000 bits per second.

The 402 MICR Reader-Sorter(middleground in center picture) read customer checks and allowed banks to later finesort them for account filing.

Cash registers as well as teller, adding, and accounting machines could be fitted with paper tape recorders which punched a tape for input to the 315.

National Optical Font "NOF" was a machine and human readable typeface which could provide computer input from cash registers and adding machines via the 420 Optical Character Reader. Punch card and magnetic tape input/output was available for compatability with other systems.

In 1963 bank teller machines were interfaced to telephone lines and connected to the 315 allowing immediate updating of customer accounts, directly from branch offices, eliminating the need for the intermediary punched paper tape. NCR coined another new data processing term, "On-Line".

The race was on to build the first computer built entirely with integrated circuits "ICs". NCR delivered the Century 100 and sometimes ally, Control Data, installed the CDC 7600 in 1968, and the winner was, too close to call.

The Criterion/8500 series debuted in 1976 and the DecisionMate V personal computer would be released in 1983. That year also saw the first installation of the 9300 which was an online multi-user system for the smaller user.

The early 1970s brought some very difficult times partly due to a slow transisition from mechanics to electronics in the cash register business. However, this 280 electronic point-of-sale terminal would be the 10,000,000th product delivered (1972).

The NCR Tower 16/32 was first delivered in 1977. It moved UNIX from the college campus to the office, the manufacturing floor, and the bank. Originally designed for 8-16 users, later models would support hundreds.

While the current focus was on proprietary mainframe systems the Tower charted the long range direction toward Open Systems. More than 100,000 of these systems would be delivered.

Although Tower is an NCR trademark, "tower" (referring to the vertical product packaging) is now a generic reference to this type of cabinetry and part of the computer lexicon.

In the early 1980s NCR would deliver 2nd generation self service terminals (SSTs). Worldwide production of these modern miracles was centralized in Scotland and the wizards in Dundee discovered all sorts of clever uses for them.

These machines would not only dispense cash, but also documents like airline tickets and boarding passes. Later models read and cashed checks (checques?) and even dispensed coin as well as paper currency. They would also be used for Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT), saving government agencies money and providing recipients additional security.

Following the Open Systems vision, NCR began a staged release of the System 3000 Family in the early '90s. This scalable series ranged from single processor workstations to massively-parallel systems with hundreds of Intel Pentium processors. NCR was delivering the massively-parallel solutions that others were just dreaming about.

Contrary to popular opinion, most of the largest databases live on these systems, not those of that other computer company.

January 1, 1997 - NCR is again an independent company with stock trading on the exchanges of the world under its former symbol, NCR.

This page was developed by:
Dale T. Knipple, FE/NE
NCR CustomerService Division
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
in 1995/96 for
NCR Financial Systems Division, London