Recent Posts

The tunnels between the buildings at the NCR factory complex were truly amazing.  In the mid-sixties I received 340 printer training in the basement of building 26 at the corner of Patterson and K street.  At the time I rented an apartment off Brown Street not far from the NCR Credit Union.  It was winter and bitter cold outside.  I would enter the building across the street from the Credit Union and take the tunnels all the way across the complex coming out at building 26, staying nice and warm for the whole trip.  These two buildings were diagonally opposite from each other and as far as you could go and still be on NCR property.  It was always an adventure to make that trip each morning and then return each evening.  We would also take the tunnels to the auditorium of building 10 to watch 45 minutes of a movie during our lunch hour every day.  A whistle would blow and the screen would go black telling us it was time to go back to work.  Fond memories.

Great post Wally!  Brought back many memories of the Dayton factory complex.

Herb Fish

Here you'll find 3 links (youtube) to films about NCR Dayton Ohio History.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ce3NkNcJhFs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeLpscfJIDc&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yc6QRJilZpc&feature=related

Have fun, watching them.
Regards Wally.

I started working at NCR in early 1970 when the factory was still going strong.  I worked in Bldg 26 on Patterson Blvd.  We used the tunnels to go to all the other buildings.  Some parts of the routes to the buildings 10, 11, 12 etc went on the factory floors and other parts were underground beneath the streets.  It was useful in bad weather when we went to the NCR lunchroom and to the daily movies shown at lunchtime in the auditorium.  I was saddened to see all the buildings gone and the large world headquaters function moved to Georgia and the University of Dayton taking over the headquarters building for research facilities.

[people]

Hello all.

Thank you for this forum. Like many others I have found this forum jogging things from my memory. I like the name CORE - although our own memories need refreshing often and after 25, 20, 30, 40 years, this forum is a good way to do it.

NCR was such a diverse company - and when I was with it in the 1970s and 80s was over 65,000 employees. I think the Topics could be widened to include some of the divisions of the company around the world that individuals may relate to better. Such categories as Regions (USDPG, PACIFIC, LAMEA, MEA, Europe); main product groups of Retail, Financial which played such an important part - and of course, R&D Labs, Engineering & Manufacturing facilities and Field Engineering.  There are many others areas of interest ranging from programming a Class 32 to the introduction and operations of Data Centres (Business Outsourcing??). Encryption, chip design, multi-byte addressing for Asian language computing (how DO you manage 30,000+ Chinese characters) - the list is massive. And NCR people did it.

Individuals relate to geographic regions, products, hardware, software - and other people. Anecdotes abound - and seriously fundamental developments and inventions that changed the world of IT should be remembered and celebrated. Yes, I am sure there are many scratchy memories  - no company can avoid the rough bits; but overall, what a stimulating and rewarding experience being associated with NCR    - The Cash as it was known in parts. Part of the BUNCH.

What a rich source of talent, skills and memories that make up the very being of who we are. No one who had spent 20 or more of their most productive years could fail to have been profoundly influenced by the company and individuals that we met - this should not be lost.

So please consider the range of topics. It is a bit like a systems analysis job determining the categories in a database - now let's see, topics and users - definitely Many to Many here. 

Hello everybody!

I am seeking a photo or other rendering of the National Cash Register Co building in Washington DC, 1219 K St NW.  it was built in 1938, the architect was E Burton Corning.

Best regards,
Aleksandrs

2. Case studies of the overhead of the task switching by Mr. Ikuo Akiyama in 1970;
    2.3 Former prototyping to eliminate too many save & restore operations on the NCR 315 RMC during late 1960s.

      Although I believe that Mr. Ikuo Akiyama is a right person to write this section, will you please, however, let me study his idea because
    I can not confirm his original document today. Thus, remembering his lecture and suggestion for us, I would like to deduce his trial to
    inspect the feasibility of ideas for improving the operational efficiency of the transaction processing on the NCR315 RMC.
      Mr. Ikuo Akiyama might have been focusing the reason why the task management makes the task switching so often. I suspect that
    there are several reasons, as following examples:
           i. The vacancy of resources for processing income transactions (request to be received, storage for transactions, or
              time to be expired).
           ii. The preemption for the higher priority task during the run of a lower priority task.
    I assume that he would test two features that are (1) the bundling of queues for incoming transactions and (2) the sending of job
    between tasks.
    a. Bundling of queues for incoming transactions.
       Mr. Ikuo Akiyama might focus to the benefit to manage the redundancy of the resource ‘Queue’ for the incoming transaction, as the
      operating system could not manage together independent resources like the DSA (Dynamic Storage Area) or the trigger of an expired
      time through separated queues. But, the old computer architecture did not accept such an idea to implement the multiple incoming
      queues structure for each task. Because such ideas used to require the manipulation of many index registers and consume much
      computing power.
       As you know well, the VRX operating system had released the feature of the Message Control System (MCS) to build the structure of
      the multi-queues on the Criterion computer system in late 1970s. The prototype of the MCS feature had been already studied by Mr.
      Ikuo Akiyama on the NCR 315 RMC originally during late 1960s. Although I have no exact information regarding the conceptual trigger for
      the VRX implementing the MCS, the rapid ITB (Internal Transferring Bus subsystem) architecture of Criterion would have caused the VRX
      design team easily to implement an idea to bundle queues for each task processing like the TOX development team had done in early
      1970s.
    b. Sending of job between tasks.
       Generally, the program has to be based on the scenario of the general processing purpose with initiating the extremity procedure for
      files to access, initializing data structures in the data section before getting any records in an input file and setting up the appropriate
      information into the proper data fields in each time getting a record. On the other hand, the transaction process has to be based on the
      scenario of the object oriented program that manages the life cycle of the processing independently by itself and does not require any
      premises like an input data structure that the receiving program can accept.
       Mr. Ikuo Akiyama might focus to the benefit to reduce any processing overheads of initialization and setup for the program. He made an
      idea to implement the task interface architecture like calling interface between subroutine modules that have their own index registers
      and data resources in each module. That is, the task interface has to be based on the connection of the control sequence. This idea is
      quite different from the data transfer interface or the event transfer interface between tasks. When I got his presentation of this idea in
      July, 1970, I was very surprised. Because I had believed that the task had to be independent from another task processing with the
      closed loop algorism internally. But his idea introduced the hopping procedure between tasks and the completed reentrant coding
      technology. I felt something new in the software architecture. This idea caused me to become happy to study the necessity of break-
      through as an engineer.

Best regards,
Katsuhiko

Ron,

I'm very intersest by the source code of startrek.
It was a super game.

Cheers

Yes, it was base 40, which was used!!
Wally.

Here you'll find a tool and info for conversion.
http://www.easysurf.cc/cnver17.htm

If you post some hex dumps of the tapes I may can help.  I used that method to read some old century series of tape I had.

Ron