NCR Proprietary Operating Systems

[Zedy]

RECAPS
Operating system developed in Canada(?) for 8200/9020 to run 7750 document processing machines.

I remember well working back late one night in the Adelaide (South Australia) office assisting one of our programming staff installings RECAPS 4.1 on a 9020 computer.

It just wouldn't install, kept coming back with an error, once decoded, pointed to the disk controller.

The Technical Manager was there too and rang Canada for assistance.

Canada had themselves not yet installed RECAPS 4.1 on a 9020 and informed him they would look into it immediately.

Several hours later they rang back and informed us we needed RECAPS 4.2 for a 9020 because of the different disk controller used in it.

They told us it would be about two days before they could supply 4.2 as they were busy writing it because of our phone call. LOL.

Amazingly once we received the updated version 4.2 everything worked smoothly.

Later 7750 controlling software came from Switzerland but I cannot recall what that was called.

[RogerHallett]

TMX (Transaction Management Executive) was used in Financial Banking Systems as the OS for the NCR BAS 5000 series online (branch automation) products. TMX allowed programs to be written in 'C' with calls to Fortran (and maybe other languages - not sure) if required, then all compiled into run-time. TMX was mutli-tasking, multi-thread if I recall correctly (some help please) and ran on the Motorolla platform in either the Tower box or a smaller custom built box. These controllers had a variety of propriety LAN comms protocols to connect the various banking peripherals (special keyboards, screens, swipe-card readers, passbook printers, back-office printers), and either IBM 3270 or SNA for Wide Area connection to the host. I am sure anyone from E&M Dayton would be able to add value to this post.

Prior to the BAS 5000, the MTS system had its own OS running on the Intel chip. Australia had some of the world's largest MTS and BAS networks.

[n8eyh with OCD-WM42 of Hilse]

Hi! RogerHallett,

Yes, exactly, the TMX is named by the BAS project team of Mr. David Nanda in E&M Dayton. Originally, the project team of Mr. Jerry Butler in E&M Columbia had modified the VERSADOS realtime OS, which is provided by Motorola,  with attaching several functions for the small controller based on MC68010 MPU which was different from the tower 1632 office systems. The BAS project manager tried to evaluate the availability of the Xenix that Mr. Bill Gates renamed the UNIX. However, E&M Dayton imported the OS architecture of VERSADOS from E&M Columbia into the BAS 5000 system, in order to install this modified VERSADOS through attaching several midleware functions for supporting the application friendliness to assist the transaction processing on the Branch Automation Systems. They called this application friendliness as the TMX (Transaction Management Executive). Originally the VERSADOS had been developed by the Motorola. When I attended the VERSADOS lecture room during a week by the Motorola instructor in the NCR Dayton Sugar camp in April, 1981. I was very surprised by the weight functionality of the VERSADOS comparing with the MTS 8 bits Intel MPU. I suspect that the Motorola strategy would be based on the simple procedure program like the 68xx MPU based application under the multi-tasking MC68010 MPU systems. However, on the other hand, the NCR system engineers might looked at this flexible OS like the versatile B4 executive on the powerful Century 300 processor, without detailed simulation of the performance of the TMX based MC68010 processing.
Although I am not sure the availability of LAN (might be OMNI-Net of NCR, 2Mbps transfer rate during the time), the BAS controller supported the IHDLC high speed communication and also the analog type communication for NCR C-270 and ATM etc.
I suspect that this IHDLC high speed lines would make high rate interruption for MC68010 MPU.
I experienced to discuss much time to make sure the performance of total volume processing for the banking transaction in the Japanese financial market. The product management had been very significant in the BAS development, I studied.
Best regards,
Katsuhiko

[msjohnso]

"Back in the day" I worked on the Software QA team in Wichita, Kansas for the IMOS, IMOS III, and IMOS V operating systems. All of them ran on the 82xx/9020 minicomputers. For retail systems, the same hardware also supported the TCOS OS, core of the STORES retail system, which had a "full-featured" back-end operating system.

As if that weren't enough, there was also the ICS retail-store scanning system, which was highly optimized to serve bar-code scanning retail terminals. ICS was capable of handling 15 scanners that scanned an aggregate of over 50,000 items per hour.