Browsing by Subject "Optical character recognition devices"

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    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.
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    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.