I remember the old cash registers. Mostly in old ma and pa stores. But mostly remember the electronic ones in department stores. Today you walk into a Walley World and here the familiar Beep noise from the scanners for the computer registers. Drives me nuts sometimes. Some of those old metal registers are very collectable now. Some with gold or brass plating! They look nice. Nothing better then the ring of an old register box opening up!

Good observation, Ron!
Though life was moving much faster at our age, it was still slow compared to now. Most of what was around when we were born was also around when we graduated high school and entered into adulthood and the real world.

We become aware at maybe 4 or 5 and made it to 20 with pretty much the same world in tact for the most part. A few things changed a little but many remained as well. But the world changes so fast now that kids will see the world change in big ways at least twice before they even hit 20. Every 10 years it’s a different world.

Now you mention NCR. That is a very interesting topic. I learned auditing just before age 19 on an NCR 5000 posting machine at the hotel I worked at in late 1977, which was made up of gears, not electronic chips. It was an advanced machine for the time.

Computers came along and changed everything, really. And that is a story that goes back to NCR. I will say this. NCR used many corrupt horrifying business practices that would make us shutter. The Industrial Revolution was a brutal time that does not get taught in school. Antitrust laws came into being in the late 1800s but they actually did very little to stop abuse of money and power. IBM was founded by the famous Mr. Watson. Mr. Watson was an employee of NCR and learned all their tricks and used them all for IBM. This is all highlighted in one of the most underrated and powerful books ever written on antitrust, big business, and the computer industry as well. It is:

Big Blue: IBM's Use and Abuse of Power by Richard T. Delamarter. It is out of print now but 57 used copies are available on Amazon alone, for as little a penny a piece plus $4 shipping. What a buy!

Delamarter worked for the Justice (I use that word loosely) Dept. and knows better than anyone what went on with the IBM antitrust suit which Reagan dismissed in 82. Watson and IBM used all the nasty tricks that NCR did, and more. In doing so, IBM held back the development of the computer industry by decades and made the USA computer industry weak and vulnerable to the Japs. But I suspect IBM holding the industry back helped the government to jump far ahead of the commercial market to keep us all under control and conceal what abilities they really had. Just my opinion.

IBM was no innovator, though they would have you believe otherwise. But today, it is Intel and Microsoft who took the place of IBM in hindering and restraining the industry. Their tactics are no better, either. Nothing has changed in this respect in 100 years. Some things never change.

But what is very scary is that despite the artificial restraint upon the computer industry, our lives have leaped forward and changed dramatically due to the computer revolution. One only wonders at what might the government might have in their underground facilities or remote facilities in some places.

But I only bring all this up because for one, that this book I refer to has gone unnoticed it a great tragedy and a great book and now for a penny, no less. There is no excuse to not get a copy and read it or get it at the library. But in addition, our world is changing all the time now, and there are very interesting reasons why this is so. It is not by accident. We boomers knew a more sane time in history. Its long since gone and the book I mention helps to show why this might be.

You will understand Microsoft much better when you know about IBM and NCR. And you will understand the ever changing world far better as well and if there is one thing we boomers can attest to, it is change. But also keep in mind that some things never change and that is where it can get scary. Think things have gotten better? Changed? I beg to differ. I want my 60s back and I want them now. ;-)

True statement: Technology changed less during the 70's than any decade in the 20th century...blame it on the stagflation/Nixon/Carter/Vietnam debt.....after all is said, the world was very much the same tech-wise in 1970 as it was in 1979......while the VCR was around in the later 70's, hardly anyone had one, and TV was exactly the same the entire decade...no cable yet, and remotes were as high-tech as it got......recording/playback devices the same 70-79 as well..same 33-45 records/8-tracks/cassettes......cars exactly the same, though a little smaller near the end of decade.....guess what was the only major tech item to change besides the pocket calculator?...The electronic cash register and bar code.......Ironically, that may have more impact on our daily life than any other 70's innovation....that register and Bar Code gave us the big-box inventory capability, and completely changed our shopping experience, for better or worse.......you really have to look at both at once, hand-in-glove...electronic register/Scanner and bar codes together completely rehauled/revolutionized the retail world, and single-handedly created Wal-Mart's complete dominance/sourcing capacity.....

And you can blame it all on the 70's!

I also began my serious working life as a hotel auditor about 1971. We had an old adding machine - rows of keys from 0 to 9 up and down for each position, and a handle on the side that had to be pulled down to register each number, like a one-armed bandit, or a vertical typewriter carriage return, and made all the wheels and gears inside whirr. It could add, subtract, and multiply (don't recall if it could divide). I vividly recall the old man who taught me the ropes, warning me to always enter the larger number first whenever I had to do a subtraction. While that machine could handle negative numbers, he cautioned that he'd worked on other adding machines that couldn't, and I might have to myself some day (I never did). It wasn't a cash register, no ka-ching, and the cash drawer was separate. The next hotel I worked at had an NCR posting machine, and I got so good at the primitive programming they used that for a while, whenever the NCR salesman in town sold a new hotel machine, he'd have the hotel hire me to set it up and train their staff. One model kept track of how far down on a folio to post by taking little bites out of the side of the cards. That was long before hanging chads, and we called the debris "chits". Every day we had to empty the machine's chit pot.

So THAT's where the term "chit pot full" came from!!! ;-)

Greetings Owen!
Really, when you think about it, the 70s was still pretty laid back and primitive. The FBI had trouble tracking Ted Bundy because of the way credit cards were processed. It was all slips of paper turned in. I recall the phone system in Maine got overhauled about 1980. I worked at Ramada Inn and they had a very primitive reservation system by computer and a sort of tele-type print out. Long distance charges would print out on a teletype, too.

You also mention the cash drawer being separate. I had an interesting experience with that. The Inn had a bar and Disco was really coming into vogue and we were getting a really bad crowd. Maine was pretty safe but I had the sense it was changing. I would hit the balance key on the NCR posting machine before hitting the button to open the drawer, even though the 2 were not attached in anyway. I figured a lot of the people asking for change for the cigarette machine might be watching me and I wanted to mislead them.

Well, would you believe it, we got robbed maybe 6 or 8 months later, on my overnight shift while I was out gathering tapes from the registers and around. I called the police. But I also checked the print out tape that recorded all transactions and someone had pressed the balance key several times and then tried some other keys. I locked the drawer, though. But they had a key to the place where we kept change for the drawers.

Plenty of suspects, including me. But I spoke up and said I felt it was someone who had come to me at least several times or even regularly and thought I was hitting the balance key to open the drawer. They didn’t buy it. But . . . it turned out to be the dish washer who had gone over the tile ceilings into the boss’ desk for the keys to the “vault” and also tried to get at the register. He came to me all the time for change for a dollar to get cigarettes. Cigs were only 50 cents a pack and went to 75 by that time. Fall 1978.

Security was substantially tightened up after that. Maine was changing and not for the better. Oh, and that NCR machine, which was said to be infallible. I, more than once, had documented proof it was not. Sometimes springs or gears would stick or malfunction in some way. A sub total readout of the categories might indicate trial balance totals were off. But after looking through everything, which was no fun, and not finding anything, I would do the final z-out which emptied the daily figures to start new. Now it said everything was fine. After several incidences, I just went right to z-out.

Its funny how the personal computer revolution helped sort of wipe out both IBM and NCR, who were blood brothers and both made obsolete by the new stuff. They are both still around but other systems have cut into their markets in big ways. Good riddance says I!

But then again, we do have up to the second surveillance now thanks to networking and immediate feedback. Its great for catching Ted Bundys but it also makes us all more vulnerable, if someone were to have bed intentions towards us all and we did not know about it. Not that I am saying that is the case or anything, you understand ;-)
Thanks for your reply, Owen. I love hearing about the good old days and good old ways. It was nice back then, wasn’t it?

With all the tech wonders of the present, I suspect some young might puzzle as to how we could say that. But ya had to be there to understand. But I am preaching to the choir, no?

To ridwan-0:

You are correct when you suggest that refining, filtering, or regulating what we focus our attention on, is important. Too much info is as bad as info deprivation and censorship. But I do notice those who publish BS links, and thereby make it tough for those who have good non-profit links to post them, since it causes many to ban all such "spaming."

To scott:
I was thinking about what you said about the 70s a little more. While it was fairly stable technologically, there were huge fast changes in our attitudes and perceptions in the 70s. These are harder to see and recognize. But they are just as real and important, and impact us far more than many of those technological changes. In fact, I found the 80s a drastic change, beginning by 1980. But we can be certain this change did not take place overnight. It was slowly growing in that direction throughout the 70s, though we were not aware of it at the time. Sort of like that frog slowly cooking as the water slowly warms without his notice.

Only on looking back can we discern and detect that something must have happened. But did it happen! My thoughts after some further time of reflection. Iron sharpens Iron, does it not? Thanks for provoking thought.

ridwan is rid-gone. :-)