() is a technology company specializing in solutions for the retail and financial industries. Its main products are
Point-of-sale Terminals ,
Automatic Teller Machine s,
Check processing systems,
Barcode Scanners , business consumables and high-powered
Data Warehousing Systems .
The company was founded in
1884 and acquired by
AT&T in
1991 . A restructuring of AT&T in
1996 , led to its re-establishment on
January 1 ,
1997 , as a separate company; that restructuring also led to the
Spin-off of
Lucent Technologies .
In
January 26 ,
2006 , the company reported revenue of $6.028 billion for the twelve months ending
December 31 ,
2005 .
NCR Reports 2005 Fourth-Quarter Results , a January 2006 press release from the company's website
The company began as the of
Dayton, Ohio , which was established to manufacture and sell the first mechanical
Cash Register , invented in
1879 by
James Ritty . In 1884 the company and patents were bought by
'''John Henry Patterson''' and his brother
Frank Jefferson Patterson and the firm was renamed the '''National Cash Register Company'''. Patterson formed NCR into one of the first modern American companies, introducing new, aggressive sales methods and business techniques. He established the first sales training school in
1893 , and introduced a comprehensive social welfare program for his factory workers.
Other significant figures in the early history of the company were
Charles F. Kettering ,
Thomas J. Watson, Sr. and
Edward A. Deeds . Watson, the founder of
IBM , eventually worked his way up to general sales manager. Bent on inspiring the dispirited NCR sales force, Watson introduced the motto "THINK!" Signs with this motto were erected in factory buildings, sales offices, and club rooms during the mid-
1890s . "THINK" later became a widely-known symbol of IBM. Kettering designed the first cash register powered by an electric motor in 1906. Within a few years he developed the Class 1000 register which was in production for 40 years, and the O.K. Telephone Credit Authorization system for verifying credit in department stores.
NCR expanded quickly and became multi-national in
1888 . By
1911 it had sold one million machines and grown to almost 6,000 employees. Combined with rigorous legal attacks, Patterson's methods enabled the company to fight off, bankrupt or buy-out over 80 of its early competitors and achieve control of 95% of the U.S. market.
In
1912 , the company was found guilty of violating the
Sherman Antitrust Act . Patterson and Watson were convicted for illegal anti-competitive sales practices and were sentenced to one year of imprisonment. Their convictions were unpopular with the public due to the efforts of Patterson and Watson to help those affected by the
Dayton, Ohio floods of
1913 , but efforts to have them pardoned by President
Woodrow Wilson were unsuccessful. However, their convictions were overturned on appeal in 1915 on the grounds that important defense evidence should have been admitted.
Two million units were sold by 1922, the year John Patterson died. In 1925 the company went public with an issue of $55 million in stock, at that time the largest public offering in United States history. During
World War I the company manufactured
Shell Fuzes and aircraft instrumentation, and during
World War II built aero-engines, bomb sights and code-breaking machines, including the American
Bombe designed by
Joseph Desch .
Building on their wartime experience, NCR became a major post-war force in developing new technology. In
1953 , following their acquisition of
Computer Research Corporation the previous year, the company created a specialised electronics division. In
1956 , NCR introduced its first electronic device, the Class 29 Post-Tronic, a bank machine using
Magnetic Stripe technology. With
GE the company manufactured its first
Transistor -based computer in
1957 , the
NCR 304 . Also in the 1950s NCR introduced MICR (
Magnetic Ink Character Recognition ). In
1962 , NCR introduced the
CRAM storage device, the first
Mass Storage alternative to
Magnetic Tape . The company's first all-
Integrated Circuit computer was the Century 100 of
1968 . The company adopted the name in
1974 .
In
1982 , NCR became involved in
Open Systems Architecture . Its first such system was the
UNIX -powered TOWER 16/32, the success of which (approximately 100,000 were sold) established NCR as a pioneer in bringing industry standards and open systems architecture to the computer market. These 5000-series systems were based on
Motorola 680xx
CPUs and supported NCR's proprietary transaction processing system
TMX , which was mainly used by financial institutions.
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In the
1980s , NCR sold various
PC Compatible AT -class computers, like the
Small Form Factor NCR-3390 (called an "intelligent terminal"). They proposed a customized version of
MS-DOS , NCR-DOS, which for example offered support for switching the CPU between 6, 8 or 10 MHz speeds. The computers featured an improved
CGA adapter, the NGA, which had a 640x400 text mode more suitable for business uses than the original 640x200 mode, with characters drawn using single-pixel-wide lines, giving an appearance similar to that of classic IBM
3270 terminals. The additional four-color 640x400 graphical mode was identical to CGA's 320x200 mode from a programming point of view.
In
1990 , NCR introduced the System 3000, a seven-level family of computers based on
Intel 's
386 and
486 CPUs. The majority of the System 3000 range utilised IBM's
Micro Channel Architecture rather than the more prevalent ISA architecture, and utilised
SCSI peripherals as well as the more popular parallel and serial port interfaces, resulting in a premium product with premium pricing.
NCR was acquired
September 19 ,
1991 by
AT&T for $7.4 billion and was joined with
Teradata Corporation on February 28, 1992. As an AT&T subsidiary, its 1992 year-end headcount was 53,800 employees and contractors.Information Statement dated November 25, 1996, furnished to AT&T shareholders of record By 1993, the subsidiary produced a year-end $1.287 billion
Net Loss on $7.265 billion in revenue. The net losses continued in 1994 and 1995, losses that required repeated subsidies from the parent company and resulted in a 1995 year-end headcount of 41,100. During these three years, AT&T was the former NCR's largest customer, accounting for over $1.5 billion in revenue.
For a while, starting in 1994 the subsidiary was renamed , but in
1995 , AT&T decided to spin-off the company, and in
1996 , changed its name back to NCR in prepartion for a
Spin-off . The company outlined its reasons for the spin-off in an Information Statement sent to its stockholders, which cited, in addition to "changes in customer needs" and "need for focused management time and attention", the following:
:...
of Vertical Integration [which had motivated ATT's earlier acquisition of NCR are outweighed by its costs and disadvantages....[T]o varying degrees, many of the actual and potential customers of Lucent and NCR are or will be competitors of AT&T's communications services businesses. NCR believes that its efforts to target the communications industry have been hindered by the reluctance of AT&T's communications services competitors to make purchases from an AT&T subsidiary.
NCR re-emerged as a stand-alone company on
January 1 ,
1997 .
In ''
In ''
The
Montgomery County Historical Society and NCR Corporation joined in 1998 into an innovative partnership committed to preserving the voluminous NCR Archive. For more than three months in late
1999 , trucks traveled between NCR's Building 28 and the Historical Society's Research Center, bringing the three million pieces of this extraordinary collection to its new home.
In
1998 , NCR sold its computer hardware manufacturing assets to
Solectron and ceased to produce general-purpose computer systems, focusing instead on the retail and financial industries. In
2000 , NCR acquired
CRM provider
Ceres Integrated Solutions and services company
4Front Technologies . Recent acquisitions include self-service companies
Kinetics ,
InfoAmerica and
Galvanon , and software company
DecisionPoint .
- Class 1000 register
- Class 2000 bank posting machine (c. 1922-1973)
- NCR Voyager , an I386 SMP computer platform that preceded Intel 's SMP specification.
