Browsing by Subject "Office equipment and supplies industry -- History"
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Item Oral history interview with A. Terence Maxwell(Charles Babbage Institute, 1980-01-09) Maxwell, A. TerenceMaxwell recalls the associations among the major British punched card companies in the 1930s: Power-Samas, the British Tabulating Machine Company (BTM), International Business Machines, and Remington Rand. He reports on discussions Powers-Samas had with Ferranti and Remington Rand on the 1958 merger with BTM to form International Computers and Tabulators (ICT). He discusses planning among ICT, English Electric, and Radio Corporation of America in subsequent years to capture European market shares and explains how these plans collapsed. He then discusses the 1963 merger between ICT and Ferranti and the 1968 merger between ICT and English Electric to form International Computers, Ltd.Item Oral history interview with Carl Rench(Charles Babbage Institute, 1984-04-18) Rench, Carl F.Rench, an NCR employee since l946, surveys the company's growth from a manufacturer of cash registers to one of the largest suppliers of business computers. He begins with NCR's l946 experiments with vacuum tube arithmetic devices, work during the Korean war on the A-1-A bombing navigational system, and the acquisition in 1952 of the Computer Research Corporation. Rench points to Joseph Desch's role in moving NCR into electronics. Rench highlights the major products of the l950s: the Post-Tronic machine for reading magnetic strips on ledger cards and doing financial transactions, and the Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) device. He mentions a l959 joint venture with General Electric to produce one of the first all-transistorized business computers. He explains how, in the 1960s, NCR returned to its earlier specialty in peripheral devices, and contrasts this approach with IBM's concentration on the sale of systems. Rench focuses on the company in the early 1970s as a major producer of metal oxide semicon- ductor chips and as a multinational corporation. He discusses at length NCR president William Anderson's decentralization of the company, the resistance among Dayton employees, and the advantages of this policy to the company's livelihood.Item Oral history interview with Curt Herzstark [English](Charles Babbage Institute, 1987-09-10) Herzstark, CurtHerzstark, an Austrian inventor and manufacturer of calculators, describes the development of the Austrian Calculating Machine Manufacturing Company (Rechenmaschinefabrik der Austria Erstanden Compagnie) and his subsequent work in the industry. The company, founded in Vienna by his father, Samuel Herzstark, in 1905, introduced the first electrically-driven calculator based on improved designs of the Thomas Arithmometer. Herzstark describes the disruption of the industry during World War I, his involvement with the company after the war, competition with American companies, and his first invention, a mechanical memory for holding subtotals, which appeared in 1928. Herzstark managed the company in 1930 and began work on his own design for a hand-held calculator. With the Anschluss of 1938, the company was again converted to war production, and produced custom gauges for German tanks. Herzstark, a Jew, was able to avoid arrest until 1943, when he was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp and worked as a technician. He recounts his arrest and internment, and how he completed the design of the CURTA hand-held calculator, a prototype of which was produced in Weimar, Germany, by Rheinmetallwerke at the end of the war. The Prince of Liechtenstein bought the design and the calculator was initially manufactured by the CURTA division of Contina AG of Liechtenstein. It was produced until 1972, when the electronic calculator forced it from the market.Item Oral history interview with Curt Herzstark [German](Charles Babbage Institute, 1987-09-10) Herzstark, CurtHerzstark, an Austrian inventor and manufacturer of calculators, describes the development of the Austrian Calculating Machine Manufacturing Company (Rechenmaschinefabrik der Austria Erstanden Compagnie) and his subsequent work in the industry. The company, founded in Vienna by his father, Samuel Herzstark, in 1905, introduced the first electrically-driven calculator based on improved designs of the Thomas Arithmometer. Herzstark describes the disruption of the industry during World War I, his involvement with the company after the war, competition with American companies, and his first invention, a mechanical memory for holding subtotals, which appeared in 1928. Herzstark managed the company in 1930 and began work on his own design for a hand-held calculator. With the Anschluss of 1938, the company was again converted to war production, and produced custom gauges for German tanks. Herzstark, a Jew, was able to avoid arrest until 1943, when he was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp and worked as a technician. He recounts his arrest and internment, and how he completed the design of the CURTA hand-held calculator, a prototype of which was produced in Weimar, Germany, by Rheinmetallwerke at the end of the war. The Prince of Liechtenstein bought the design and the calculator was initially manufactured by the CURTA division of Contina AG of Liechtenstein. It was produced until 1972, when the electronic calculator forced it from the market.Item Oral history interview with Robert E. Mumma(Charles Babbage Institute, 1984-04-19) Mumma, Robert E.Mumma describes National Cash Register's (now NCR) early years in the electronic computing industry. Mumma went to work for NCR in 1939 in their newly formed Electronic Research Department. Before the war he designed gas thyratron tubes for use as decimal counters in an electronic calculator, a working model of which was completed before the war. Mumma discusses the contact NCR had during this period with MIT and Harvard, and reviews some of the early research projects and personnel at NCR. He describes in guarded terms work NCR did before the war for NDRC on a secret communication system and during the war on a high speed counter for measuring muzzle velocity of cannon shells. He recounts how war-time work on cryptanalytic equipment took all the company's effort, and how this shaped company policy resisting government contract work after the war. The second half of the interview describes NCR's move into commercial electronic computing in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, with such products as cash registers with punched tape, accounting machines with electronic multiplier, high-speed printers, bar code readers, point-of-sale terminals, and magnetic ink character recognition equipment. Mumma explains how NCR considered purchasing the Eckert-Mauchly Company prior to its acquisition of Computer Research Corporation, as a way of entering the computer field. The division of labor between NCR-Dayton and the NCR-CRC division are considered, as are the difficulties of promoting, developing, and marketing electronic technology in the mechanically-oriented environment of NCR headquarters in Dayton.