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You mean kind of like POS. Point of Sale. Geeez! What were you thinking of?

Even better - what was NCR thinking of?

Part of it is that that's the solutions they are buying. For example, NCR is a very common ATM brand. Look at the specifications of this model: ncr selfserv22

SOFTWARE: Windows® XP Pro

The monochrome NT machine was a Royal.

Big companies with real products and a user base can hang on for a long time. Unisys is still around. NCR (National Cash Register), amazingly, is still around, and still selling cash registers (now "Point of Sale Workstations"). Most of the names on the list, like CA, Sun, VMware, and Novell, still have an installed base to service. They can shrink and remain profitable.

I'd look for collapses in advertising-funded companies. We'll probably see some of the social networks go bust. Companies that get most of their revenue from Google ads are at risk. Marchex (the people with "www.90210.com" and hundreds of thousands of similar junk domains) have had their stock drop from 25 to 5. Expect to see free hosting sites, free mail services, and free blog services shut down.

I did a list like this back in the dot-com area, based strictly on cash-flow analysis. That was quite accurate. It's easy to do this analysis for money-losing startups. The definition of "dead" used was "stock dropped 90%". From a stockholder perspective, that's "dead", even if some vestige of the company hangs on. That's was quite common with overfunded startups, by the way. Some of them succeeded, some of them went bust, but many of them become what VCs call "zombies"; they could generate enough revenue to cover their costs, but they couldn't pay back the money invested in them.

We've done several studies of touch screens at my shop, mostly to answer the question: "which touch technology is best?" Last year we did another study where we installed various touch screen technologies on about a hundred cash registers, measured cashier performance, and collected cashier observations and feedback. We were expecting to get several complaints regarding comfort over time, others who found it easier to use, and were hoping to come up with a way to "justify" offsetting the complaints with the gains in productivity. These gains would first have to pay off the extra initial expense of the touch screen, but then would offer us labor savings.

But instead we were very surprised by the results of the study: the touch screens did not make the operators more productive. We saw absolutely no gains in performance. We even looked for a slight bump for new cashiers to demonstrate it was easier for them to learn on a touch screen, but we found nothing at all.

Regarding the cashier's comments, we consistently come up with the same results: a screen high and vertical enough to be very comfortably visible makes for an uncomfortable input device. This includes both touch screens and monitor-height keyboards, such as the NCR Dynakey. Operators find the bent wrist position uncomfortable over time, and their arms get tired. Traditional keyboards at waist height are just as productive, but cost much less.

Maybe you should look at who Hurd has worked for in the past and the legacy of his predecessor, Lars Nyberg. If you think Carly was bad, this guy may just bring the 1990's NCR disasters over to HP instead of bringing back the "HP Way". With the company gutted after Hurd and Nyberg, he's proven himself to have a worse reputation. He had a chance to prove himself different, but he failed in that respect up to this point.

He is not the "blue collar" person that you think he might be. He was one of those who helped destroy that part of NCR.

The typical account information line printed at the bottom of your typical credit card statement or utility bill is printed in a font known as OCR-A. Equipment for machine reading this type of font has been around for over 25 years, such as some of the old Banctec 4300 series workstations used for processing bill payments and checks. Even these 1970s era machines had better than a 95 percent read rate of the entire account information line, provided that the printing was clear and properly placed. Later machines, such as the NCR 7780 or the OPEX Eagle can have better than a 99 percent read rate of a full line of characters. Again, the usual limitations on reliability of OCR characters are a result of poor or mislocated printing, or stray marks in the OCR field. Here is the obligatory Wikipedia link if you interested in finding out a bit more about the history of Optical Character Recognition.

MICR fonts, which are those funny looking numbers printed in magnetic ink at the bottom of most checks are designed to be human recognizable but machine readable, and have been around since the '60s. OCRA typically beats MICR today, but a good MICR line is still readable over 95 percent of the time.

Handwritten fonts are the most difficult to read, but the technology has been available to read handwritten numbers and letters for over 10 years, but typical read rates for something like a handwritten zip code or the numerical amount written on a check range from 60 to 80 percent, and are slowly getting better. Again, a lot depends on how much care is taken when writing out the text, and what kind of background clutter is present.

As for me, I typed out school reports in 8th grade in 1973, when our family's word processing hardware consisted of a 1940's vintage Underwood typewriter. Even humans had difficulty decoding my handwriting!

Few people know to interact with a database efficiently. http://www.ncr.com/en/solutions/solutions.htm takes this to an extreme but with a good db design you don't have to worry about scalability. It might take a little time to figure out what to index ect, but unless your over 10k transactions per second there is no reason to worry about scalability. Chances are performance issues are based around your design and using the db more will help. This is not to say that cashing is without value, but with proper indexing SELECT can be insanely fast on multi million record tables.

PS: This is not to say all systems work well with a huge db on the back end but when you look at the total costs of doing this stuff in house even Oracle and 50k in HW can seem cheep.

I believe you forgot the near-dead, services based sellout known as National Cash Register. They only share small amounts of history in the early times of the cash register. After that, they're mostly separate. Now, they both do their own types, but on a much lesser scale than known previously - current NCR machines are just NCR labeled hardware with NT and BassPoiNT loaded in.

As for both IBM/NCR's R&D divisions, they are probably best stated as standstill due to "globalization". The kind that sells off anything, even land to land grab happy entities that overstate their moral character, or moves jobs (uncompetitively) to places far enough out of the US to keep them well out of reach of any interested US citizen willing to rightfully take back his job in the "not-so-free market".

Maybe the human factor might need to be put back in economics before a C-level be publicly executed (and with noone to care to act as a witness) to return the lack of their organization's humanity in kind.

You probably dont know of the recent history of the company from which he left. Search for "NCR Corp" "Healthcare" "cuts". That should give you a starting point on what they've recently become, and what you might see from Hurd.

I don't work for, near, or against NCR in any market, I just live here. My perception has been that Hurd took NCR and focused them on ATM machines, their core business. Lots and lots of other unrelated things were shed, including long-term employees and facilities. Most recently, NCR has turned over maintenance of their world-class headquarters to a local office-real estate company (Miller Valentine). Their ATM sales, by the way, are in competition with the infamous Diebold, Inc. And in that market, Diebold is innovating with ways to keep banks coming back to them. NCR just never seemed to get the hang of it.

Now back to HP and the recent high speed printing invention , and I would have to say we can all expect HP to shed all the unprofitable businesses and focus heavy on the printing. Well, heavier than they already do.

I expect that if HP is in some select-contract, highly-profitable, niche market that they will stay there. NCR has their TeraData database. HP had, during the merger claimed that Compaq's worldwide sales and services forces would allow them to dominate global industries, but I don't think that really every took foot they way they wanted to. So, unless they drum up something other than calculators and home PCs, those segments are likely to get hit hard. Hurd likely won't wait for the home PC market to do something unique because they've had a couple of dozen years to find a niche and haven't. I'd better say goodbye to the calculator segment too before Cringely goes around saying something stupid like "you saw it here first."

So that leaves the saturated inkjet market. Since the DMCA cannot be used, and since we're already paying $3,800US per gallon of ink, increasing profitability will be difficult to do without large customer outbursts. Of course, NCR was so full of waste, those of us in Dayton didn't think they could ever shed all of it and yet they did.

Due to previous employment with a retail organization, I have one of these and was planning on setting it up in my kitchen for the same purpose; Well, minus the TV part. You should be able to find some on E-bay. NCR 7454 POS Workstation

Perhaps for most commodity DBMS's, but Teradata's SQL is pretty powerful, and has been adding a lot more powerful capabilities esp. in the past few years (Refer to the Teradata SQL reference manuals for details). I've written some time-series type queries myself against 1 billion+ rows (rowcounts are probably more meaningful for this discussion) that, while reading a bit like "War and Peace", do an admirable and efficient job.

I have no doubt that Walmart (and others) often take extracts from the Teradata warehouse for use with other apps (e.g., SAS)...but in many cases, that process is inherited from a prior Oracle/DB2/etc. environment, and simply hasn't been updated to exploit Teradata's capabilities. Its always a challenge for those of us schooled on Teradata to explain to those coming from other DBMS environments that you can usually get the job done with properly crafted SQL and the proper index selection.

Seems like they'd need to license map-reduce from google or something.

As the article says, they're using Teradata. This is not a product that I'd expect the average Slashbot, who thinks "IT" and "internet" are synonymous, to have heard of. Nevertheless, if you work with industrial amounts of data, you will know that Teradata databases can reasonably claim to be to Oracle as Oracle is to MySQL.

With SQL.

Teradata was built to handle processing very large datasets from day 1. 460 Terabytes distributed across a large number of CPUs and disks working in parallel with a robust SQL implementation isn't really the challenge. The hard part is keeping all those disks spinning when you start pushing MTBF limits, handling the thousands of concurrent users all banging away at the data, and the constant streaming of new data into the system in order to support near real-time DSS.

For those inclined to know more, check here.

Around 1998 or so (I could be wrong on the exact year), NCR Corp had a very similar concept called The Virtual Branch.

Granted, it did not have pop corn and kid play zone, but it was too close to what this article is saying.

The idea is to have a branch without real people serving customer in it. It would all be ATMs, Kiosks and Video links to a call center.

Of course NCR being an ATM and Kiosk company with strong presence in the financial industry, it made sense to propose such a setup, since it meant more sales of the products they make.

I've had quite decent luck with actual service contractors doing all the work and ordering, as opposed to the OEM doing it. NCR has a fairly good reputation, and they manufacturer some of their own stuff, but also will support others. I'm sure there are varied reactions to NCR, but I have had quite good results with them in the past. Their online trouble ticket process is very nice too. . .

They're still around. Strange you don't hear much about them anymore.

Yes, it's a bit late, but the patent numbers are mentioned in NCR's press release.

U.S. Court of Appeals Upholds NCR, Lemelson License Agreement

Court rejects Lemelson appeal, protects NCR retail customers from present and future suits brought by Lemelson with respect to NCR point-of-sale bar code scanners

ATLANTA -- On April 23, 2002, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued an order upholding a previous court decision that rendered NCR Corporation's (NYSE: NCR) retail customers immune from legal action by the Lemelson Foundation (Lemelson) with regard to use of NCR bar code scanners.

The original suit, filed by NCR in 1999, challenged Lemelson's attempt to rescind an existing agreement licensing NCR to patents for bar code scanning technology. In addition to licensing NCR, the agreement covered NCR resellers and customers from infringement claims for using scanners purchased from NCR.

"Protecting our customers is our number-one priority," said Vice President, NCR RealScan, Pierre Abboud. "Because NCR carefully and proactively negotiated the terms of this agreement years ago, our past, present and future customers are safe from any future threats Lemelson may make. Other scanner manufacturers may not be able to provide this protection."

In fact, other scanner suppliers have filed a lawsuit against Lemelson to declare its patents void, which could take up to a year or more to conclude. Lemelson has sued more than 100 retailers for using bar code scanning at the point of sale (POS), and many others have received letters threatening litigation.

"The potential cost in time and money resulting from Lemelson suits poses a huge threat to the livelihood of retailers, who must operate in an increasingly competitive environment," said Abboud. "Beyond providing a superior product, NCR is pleased that our customers have one less concern to distract them from running a successful business."

Named the global leader in stationary bar code scanners by Venture Development Corporation, NCR installed the first bar code scanner in a supermarket in 1974. NCR's bi-optic scanners -- which also can read the new Reduced Space Symbology bar codes -- lead the industry in their ability to read bar codes on the first pass, improving checkout efficiency and customer satisfaction. NCR is a member of the technical committees of the Uniform Code Council, the organization responsible for defining the format of bar code data, and sits on the technology committee for MIT's Auto-ID Center, founded to explore the next paradigm for automatic identification and data capture in Retail POS technology.

How long until say ebay or any big service provider works a roundabout for NCR's patents?

AT&T divested themselves of NCR (then AT&T Global Information Solutions) in 1996. Try NCR'S History next time.

I'll also admit I knew this because my father used to be a regional sales manager for NCR until his unceremonious layoff for being too old and not young enough. God Bless Corporate America!

The NCR ATMs at my bank's branches appear to have been "upgraded" to Windows NT 3.51. The "benefits" appear to be Spanish language prompts and annoying colorful advertisements while my transaction is processing.

Many modern ATMs are coming equiped with an audio output socket, which allows the blind person to plug in a headset and have the screen instructions read to her by the ATM directly. Here is a link to a bank which has this in some of their ATMs. NCR has said that all future ATMs they produce will be audio enabled by default. I hope that other ATM manufacturers will follow.

Neither the NRC nor the EPA show any record of Golf Manor (the city in which this supposedly occurred), nor of David Hahn. (There is a David Hahn-Baker listed as a member of an advisory board.)

NCR. Founded 1885. Headquarters in Dayton, Ohio. Over a century in the "point of sale" business. And now #1 in transaction processing. Now that's an old-economy company.

And as part of the Manhattan Project, he was designing a high-speed electronic counter needed for developing the atom bomb. But all that work would be swept aside for the Navy's highest priority - breaking the Enigma Code.

In a tersely stated letter to the National Defense Research Committee on Aug. 17, 1942, Desch wrote: "We have other work of higher priority rating on which we can usefully place our engineers, but once they are started on such other work, they cannot be withdrawn . . . for some time to come." By mid-summer, two of the Navy's bright young theoreticians were in England learning all about the British bombe and sending reports back to the States. Desch received at least some of that information, enough to persuade him that he needed to take a direction different from both the British and the U.S. Navy if he were to turn out a machine in time. After weeks of agonizing, Desch decided on a major technological leap - backwards. H proposed an electromechanical device that wouldn't be pretty, wouldn't be elegant, but would accomplish the job through sheer brute force. "We never had any doubt about it. We knew what (the machine) had to do," Mumma said. "It was just matter of time, but time was of the essence."

Take a look at this historical progression on one of the BUNCH, NCR. You can see how general purpose computing arrives on the scene in a context of transaction-specific machines (eg., cash registers).

Yep, while this may seem like just one of many recent announcements of clustering products for Linux, LifeKeeper is a little different because it is based on proven high-availability (HA) technology that many Fortune 500 companies, including Chase Manhattan Bank and AT&T, use on a day-to-day basis to insure that business-critical applications keep running under any circumstances. LifeKeeper was originally developed by NCR for its MP-RAS UNIX, where it competed head-to-head with UNIX-based HA clustering products from heavy-weights such as IBM and HP. NCR later ported LifeKeeper to Windows NT and Solaris, and when the company got out of the general systems business to focus on the retail market, it sold the technology off to Steeleye, a start-up founded by a group of industry veterans which is now doing the port to Linux. Steeleye's functional overview of LifeKeeper for Linux is here, and NCR still maintains detailed documentation for LifeKeeper here.

The availability of LifeKeeper directly from Compaq is a big step forward for the deployment of Linux systems in enterprise environments because HA clusters need to be tested and supported on a system basis, i.e. HW and SW together.

Yep, while this may seem like just one of many recent announcements of clustering products for Linux, LifeKeeper is a little different because it is based on proven high-availability (HA) technology that many Fortune 500 companies, including Chase Manhattan Bank and AT&T, use on a day-to-day basis to insure that business-critical applications keep running under any circumstances. LifeKeeper was originally developed by NCR for its MP-RAS UNIX, where it competed head-to-head with UNIX-based HA clustering products from heavy-weights such as IBM and HP. NCR later ported LifeKeeper to Windows NT and Solaris, and when the company got out of the general systems business to focus on the retail market, it sold the technology off to Steeleye, a start-up founded by a group of industry veterans which is now doing the port to Linux. Steeleye's functional overview of LifeKeeper for Linux is here, and NCR still maintains detailed documentation for LifeKeeper here.

The availability of LifeKeeper directly from Compaq is a big step forward for the deployment of Linux systems in enterprise environments because HA clusters need to be tested and supported on a system basis, i.e. HW and SW together.

Yep, while this may seem like just one of many recent announcements of clustering products for Linux, LifeKeeper is a little different because it is based on proven high-availability (HA) technology that many Fortune 500 companies, including Chase Manhattan Bank and AT&T, use on a day-to-day basis to insure that business-critical applications keep running under any circumstances. LifeKeeper was originally developed by NCR for its MP-RAS UNIX, where it competed head-to-head with UNIX-based HA clustering products from heavy-weights such as IBM and HP. NCR later ported LifeKeeper to Windows NT and Solaris, and when the company got out of the general systems business to focus on the retail market, it sold the technology off to Steeleye, a start-up founded by a group of industry veterans which is now doing the port to Linux. Steeleye's functional overview of LifeKeeper for Linux is here, and NCR still maintains detailed documentation for LifeKeeper here.

The availability of LifeKeeper directly from Compaq is a big step forward for the deployment of Linux systems in enterprise environments because HA clusters need to be tested and supported on a system basis, i.e. HW and SW together.

It runs on NCR's 5200 system, which is based on Intel architecture. It scales up to 512 nodes, with 1-4 Intel processors per node.

The operating system is NCR's MP-RAS (a flavor of UNIX that runs on Intel architecture). I'm not sure if it runs Linux ;-)

*disclaimer*
I _do_ work for NCR, but I just thought this was some neat information. I don't work in our data warehousing department. The system above would cost many millions of dollars, so it's out of the range of the average /. reader, and if you are going to spend that money on a data warehouse, chances are you are talking with NCR anyway.

It runs on NCR's 5200 system, which is based on Intel architecture. It scales up to 512 nodes, with 1-4 Intel processors per node.

The operating system is NCR's MP-RAS (a flavor of UNIX that runs on Intel architecture). I'm not sure if it runs Linux ;-)

*disclaimer*
I _do_ work for NCR, but I just thought this was some neat information. I don't work in our data warehousing department. The system above would cost many millions of dollars, so it's out of the range of the average /. reader, and if you are going to spend that money on a data warehouse, chances are you are talking with NCR anyway.

First, why do Beer and Pampers get sold together? The theory is that the wife picks up the groceries in the sedan, and leaves the bulky stuff for the husband (often driving the SUV). She asks the husband to pick up the Pampers, and while he is at it, he also gets the beer.

Wal-Mart uses their datawarehouse as a HUGE competitive weapon. K-Mart uses the same technology (see below) and have not gotten much competitive advantage off it. The reason is that Wal-Mart analyze detail data, but K-Mart analyzes sample branch.

Wal-Mart uses extensive research to open new branches. This includes demographic, driving distance, average household income, ...etc. They know that the average customer drives 17 minutes to shop at a Wal-Mart, and passes two K-Marts and a Target on the way!

By the way, the visionary behind their datawarehouse (Randy Mott) left them after two decades, and joined another company.

By the way, their datawarehouse is probably the largest commercial database, and it runs on NCR Massively Parallel hardware (Worldmark), and the really unique Datawarehousing Optimized database called Teradata

I know, because I used Teradata, and work for NCR :-)

Recently, Travelocity and E-Trade joined the who's-who list of Teradata users (British Airways, Bank of America, Wal-Mart, Delta Airlines, Royal Bank of Canada, and tons more).

Basically, if you have a large amount of data to analyze, (specially 500 GB or more, the more the better :-), don't use Informix, nor Oracle nor IBM DB2: Teradata just shines!

I was a Texas regional manager with Little Caesars for 7 years, from 1991-1998, and every store used NCR registers exclusively.