Oral history interview with Carl Rench
1984-04-18
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Oral history interview with Carl Rench
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1984-04-18
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Charles Babbage Institute
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Oral History
Abstract
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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Transcript, 92 pp. Audio file available at http://purl.umn.edu/95249
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Previously Published Citation
Carl F. Rench, OH 72. Oral history interview by William Aspray, 18 April 1984, Dayton, Ohio. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. http://purl.umn.edu/107606
Suggested citation
Rench, Carl F.. (1984). Oral history interview with Carl Rench. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/107606.
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