page_title: NCR Corporation
section_title: Post-war
hierarchical_section_title: NCR Corporation / History / Post-war
caption_attribution_description: Photo of NCR 304 computer system.
context_page_description: NCR Corporation, previously known as National Cash Register is an American software, managed and professional services, consulting and technology company that also makes self-service kiosks, point-of-sale terminals, automated teller machines, check processing systems, and barcode scanners. NCR had been based in Dayton, Ohio, starting in 1884, but in June 2009 the company sold most of the Dayton properties and moved its headquarters to the Atlanta metropolitan area in unincorporated Gwinnett County, Georgia, near Duluth. In early January 2018, the new NCR Global Headquarters opened in Midtown Atlanta near Technology Square.
  NCR was founded in 1884 and acquired by AT&T in 1991. A restructuring of AT&T in 1996 led to NCR's re-establishment on January 1, 1997, as a separate company and involved the spin-off of Lucent Technologies from AT&T.
context_section_description: Building on its wartime experience with secret communication systems, high speed counters and cryptanalytic equipment, NCR became a major post-war force in developing new computing and communications technology.
  In 1953 chemists Barrett K. Green and Lowell Schleicher of NCR in Dayton submitted a patent "Pressure responsive record materials" for a carbon-less copy paper. This became US Patent 2,730,457 and was commercialized as "NCR Paper."
  In February 1953, the company acquired the Computer Research Corporation (CRC), after which it created a specialized electronics division. In 1956, NCR introduced its first electronic device, the Class 29 Post-Tronic, a bank machine using magnetic stripe technology. With the General Electric Company (now known as GE ), the company manufactured its first transistor-based computer in 1957, the NCR 304. Also in the 1950s NCR introduced MICR (magnetic ink character recognition) and the NCR 3100 accounting machines.
  In 1962, NCR introduced the NCR-315 Electronic Data Processing System which included the CRAM storage device, the first automated mass storage alternative to magnetic tape libraries accessed manually by computer operators. The NCR 390 and 500 computers were also offered to customers who did not need the full power of the 315. The NCR 390 accepted four types of input: magnetic ledger cards, punched cards, punched tape, and keyboard entry, with a tape read speed of 400 characters a second.
  The company's first all-integrated circuit computer was the Century 100 of 1968. The Century 200 was added in 1970. The line was extended through the Century 300. The Century series was followed by the Criterion series in 1976, NCR's first virtual machine system.
  During this period, NCR also produced the 605 minicomputer for in-house use. It was the compute engine for the 399 and 499 accounting machines, several generations of in-store and in-bank controllers, and the 82xx/90xx IMOS COBOL systems. The 605 also powered peripheral controllers, including the 658 disk subsystem and the 721 communications processor.
  In 1974, NCR developed scanners and computers marked the first occasion where items with the Universal Product Code (UPC) was scanned at the checkout of a supermarket, Troy's Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio; a few miles away from NCR's Dayton Headquarters.  It was treated as a ceremonial occasion and involved a little bit of ritual. The night before, a team of Marsh's supermarket staff had moved in to put bar codes on hundreds of items in the store while NCR installed their scanners and computers.
  In 1982, NCR's Peripheral Products Division in Wichita, Kansas, together with peripheral manufacturer, Shugart Associates, helped propel the computer industry into a new era of intelligent standardized peripheral communications with the development the Small Computer System Interface (SCSI).  The SCSI standard enabled such diverse devices as disks, tapes, printers, and scanners to share a common interface to one or
  more computer systems in a way that was never before possible and a model for subsequent interfaces to follow.  NCR developed the world's first SCSI interface chip based on the SCSI interface standard collaboratively developed.
  By 1986, the number of mainframe makers had dropped from 8 (IBM and the "seven dwarfs") to 6 (IBM and the "BUNCH") to 4: IBM, Unisys, NCR, and Control Data Corporation.
  The company adopted the name NCR Corporation in 1974.
caption: NCR 304 Computer
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