1985

NCR

With my portion of the SDHS system completed, I needed new work and Elias came through again with a contract with NCR. While working on the first contract the Harris Composition Division that brought me to Melbourne, Elias had become friends with George, one of the managers there.  After Harris formed their Word Processing Division from their Composition Division, taking many of the Composition managers and employees which included myself, George left Harris went to work at NCR Office Systems Division, who, like Harris, was developing their own office system.  Word processing systems were hot, every office in the world was working on one, the numbers projected by Harris created a picture of tremendous profits. Like Harris, Wang, Toshiba, Lanier, NCR was also working on their system, but they had a greater vision of it not only doing word processing, but also doing other office functions, thus their “Office Systems Division”. 

NCR Mechincial Cash Register

Most people have heard of the IBM company, but few these days remember that IBM was formerly International Business Machines, note the “Machines” not computers as they became known for.  The NCR Corporation has a similar story, formerly the “National Cash Register” company, it had been around longer even longer than IBM, making cash registers since 1884. Just about everyone in the United States who had been shopping knew of NCR from their cash registers in businesses across the country.  National Cash Register company saw the future was in computers, and by 1983 was fully embraced the electronic and computer devices and thus, like IBM, shorted their name to just NCR

NCR had taken a different approach to their office system putting them much further along than Harris.  First NCR was not just a “word processing” system, it was an “office system” that could do more than just word processing.  Second was the hardware itself, unlike Harris who designed a custom computer based on the Intel processor, NCR used an “open” systems approach building their office system based on the IBM PC architecture.  While Harris was struggling with the hardware, NCR only had to repackage the open IBM PC design into their own cabinet. It was a pretty nice design, sitting on a single three foot wide base had on the right a 12 inch monitor while on the left was the computer made to look like a paper stand to learn papers on.  NCR shipped one of the systems down to Elias’s office to use for software development.

Another major difference was NCR used the C programming language.  One of Harris’s major failings was using their HPL programming language.  So yet again I learned yet another programming language. The C language had been around for a while, developed by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs in the early 70’s.  The C language was considered an “unstructured” programming language, but it was that unstructuredness that made it a powerful programming language.  Later programming languages such as Pascal (and HPL based on Pascal) were initially put forth by academia as being “structured” to rectify in part C’s unstructuredness.  There were all sorts of debates about the advantages and disadvantages that I read about in the ACM SIGPLAN interest group.  I liked the C language, it was flexible, concise and powerful. 

The contract with NCR was for a variety of small tasks that could be specified and worked on remotely. With the NCR office system division in Atlanta, Elias and I flew up to Atlanta for an initial kickoff meeting then I was able to do all the work at Elias’s office in Indialantic. Elias by this time had moved his office from the building on A1A to a rented office space a block off the 5th Avenue in Indialantic.  While it didn’t have an ocean view, it was only a few blocks from the beach.  When I first started working for Elias I lived in Indialantic and commuted going west across the Banana River, now living on Easy Street, I commuted the opposite way going east across the Banana River to Elias’s office in Indialantic.  No matter which way of the commute, it is a beautiful sight to see the ever changing river as I crossed it each day.

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