NCR Oral History.


LM: Today is September 12, 2003, and we are at the Montgomery County Historical Society and my name is Leo McGrath. I have the opportunity today to talk to Tom Sherby, Dr. Sherby, regarding his life with NCR. So, Tom, just start wherever you want to and we'll go from there.

TS: OK. Well, I joined NCR directly out of graduate school from the University of Pittsburgh as a result of reading an advertisement in Mechanical Engineering magazine looking for someone to run an organization called Design Consulting Services and I was a replacement for a Dr. Joe -I can't remember his last name - who used to make wine as I remember by stomping the grapes. He was a real character. I never did replace him because he was so much of an interesting character. But anyway this organization reported to Frank Laub which in turn reported to Carl Rench. So I applied for the job when I was still a graduate student and after an interview in Dayton was fortunate enough to get the job and came here and took up my duties which consisted . . . I guess the general mission of this organization - the overall mission was to help NCR convert from being a mechanical cash register company to a computer company, which was kind of a major and rather traumatic change for the engineering organization. I can't speak for the sales organization or the administration. But that was a big change for the engineering organization.

LM: What year was that again, Tom?

TS: It was 1966. I came in June of 1966. I guess my first recollection is that after I had my interview of coming to . . . I lived in the apartments that are over off of Brown Street and I was here on a weekend and I went in the front office of the main building and then the guard sent me through the tunnels which I didn't know existed, so I went through the tunnels, which was very exciting, to get over to building 90 - I think that was the number. It was the old engineering building.

LM: Building 30.

TS: Building 30. Thank you. Building 30. I'd forgotten. So that's how I started and where do I go from here?

LM: So what did you do when you first came here? You were in the process of . . . what were your day-to-day duties?

TS: My day-to-day duties were supervising a group of programmers who were writing code to take input from the sales organization as to the features and functions needed by a Class 5 cash register and convert that into instructions and paper tape that would punch out the slides and all the various computing parts needed to make a Class 5 cash register that would perform those features and functions. We never had numerically controlled machine tools before that. This was a whole new world. So that was a big part of the organization.

LM: What did you run those programs on?

TS: It was written in NEAT.

LM: NEAT 3 [an assembly language for the NCR Century series, a line of fully disk-based computers]?

TS: In NEAT 3 and they were on . . .

LM: On the 615 [Century series computer]?

TS: Yeah, the 615. Before that they were run on something . . . the 615 was here when I came here . . . but before that they were run on something before the 615. I don't even know what it was. That was pretty low-level . . . that was hard work.

LM: NEAT 3 was just a level above machine language.

TS: Exactly. So I had a group of guys doing that and then we had a group of guys . . .
LM: Who were they? Do you remember any names?

TS: I don't remember. That was '66, so it's pushing 40 years so I guess I don't remember too many of those names. I remember some of the faces, but I can't remember the names. Then there were three or four other guys who were involved in special design projects, particularly the hammer failures on the 640 printer, the line printer we had for the Century series. That was, a matter of fact, a problem when I was interviewed by Jim . . . the guy who was heading up the . . . I forget his last name . . . but he was heading up the 640 project. They wanted to see if I knew anything practical so I spent . . .

LM: Jim Taylor!

TS: Yeah, Jim Taylor's project, and we had continuing problems with the hammer. The hammer was held up by a couple of springs that moved back and forth and they were failing from fatigue and various things like that. I had a couple guys working of those problems and some other mechanical problems that escape me, but as time went by my personal mission other than supervising this suddenly became . . . I was sent to Hawthorne [California] because of the head crash problems on the Century series disk drives.

LM: The flying heads were not flying.

TS: The flying heads that didn't fly. I spent a long time personally working on the non-flying head problem. I don't know if we ever brought it to much resolution but maybe they didn't crash as much as they did before. But it was an interesting project.

LM: So you were out there permanently?

TS: No, on temporary duty.

LM: Who did you work for out there? Who did you report to out there? Or were you still reporting back to Dayton?

TS: I was still reporting to Dayton, but I was on temporary duty to Eckdahl and the Chief Engineering, Dennis . . . I can't remember Dennis' last name. But anyway, that was the group I worked with when I was out there. I think my assignment in Design Service Consulting ended fairly quickly when I was, for whatever reason, transferred to work for Bill Kessler as head of Advanced Research and Development. So then I started on a different career.

LM: That was still in Bldg. 30?

TS: Still in Bldg. 30. I don't remember too many of the people I worked with. I remember a guy I worked with, Chet Albosta, but he did not work for me. He also worked for Kessler at the time. We did some interesting things. We came close to inventing the black and white bar code. I say close because we never solved the problem of how to generate a clock. So our solution was to use a three-color system - black, white, and green. Which eventually NCR did produce a product but the fact that you had to have two ribbons instead of one ribbon, it was expensive so it never succeeded and somehow somebody else came up with a black and white bar code that became the world standard. We did some interesting things. We came up with some scanning devices that, although I think we were before our time on the scanning devices, that group had a vision of the supermarket as it kind of exists today where at the register everything is scanned in at the register but from an inventory standpoint you can go through with a portable, so we have portable inventory devices to take inventory on the shelves. So we were a little bit ahead of our time.
I'll never forget the first time I got to present to the Board of Directors of NCR. I'm sure this man has passed away. I was presenting the concept of a hand-held scanning device. We had a mock-up of it. He fell asleep. He was either the President or CEO of Copper's Corporation and he fell sound asleep during my presentation and I have never forgotten that. I was a very young man.

LM: Made you wonder a little bit.

TS: Yeah, made me wonder a little bit. But he fell sound asleep.

LM: Is it me or is it him?

TS: Exactly. And then another gentleman of great renown. He came here from Citibank. Citibank was a big customer of NCR. That was John Reed, who eventually became the chairman of Citibank and subsequently the co-chairman and when Sandy Wild took it over, he left. But John Reed was a young guy that was running Operations for Citibank. He was a graduate of MIT and we showed him all of our futuristic concepts and things like that. He was quite interested. That was a fun time. That was a job that I enjoyed a great deal. And I loved working for Bill Kessler. I thought Bill Kessler was probably the most natural engineer that I have ever met in my life and I went to great lengths to pattern myself after him. After the years I worked for him, it paid off. So if Bill is alive and he's listening, I learned a lot.
LM: I agree with you. When I first came to NCR, I worked for Bob Myers who worked for Bill Kessler. I had a program once. I put together an engineering school for graduates right out of college under Bill's supervision. I agree that he was a great engineer.

TS: When it came to understanding the physics of why things worked, Bill had the best handle on it. It wasn't super-theoretic; it was just common sense. And he also had a way of teaching me that if you can't explain it in very simplistic terms, you don't understand it. And I carried that with me to this day - 37, 36 years later.

LM: So, anyway, what year was that?

TS: Oh, it had to be '68, '69, something like that. And then I don't know if I had another job between that, but the next job I remember dramatically was I was made Chief Engineer of the Data Terminals Division when I went to work for Neil Jorgensen. Neil was Vice President of the Data Terminals Division which at that time, as you probably know, the Data Terminals Division was everything that NCR made except for the Century series out on the west coast. I would have to say that that was the best job that any engineer in the world could ever have. Anything from small computers to the hand-cranked adding machines that we made in Ithaca and all over the world. And so that was . . . I just loved that job. I can tell you I would come in at 7 o'clock in the morning and wouldn't go home until 7 o'clock at night because it was just fun.

LM: Do you remember any of the engineering managers working for you then? Did Neil report to Carl Rench?

TS: No, Neil reported to Don Eckdahl. That was after the Eckdahl era. Frank Laub had gone to RB and I don't know what Carl was doing at that time. Maybe Carl had retired. But I reported to Jorgensen. Jorgensen reported to Eckdahl.

LM: What products were developed during your period there? Do you remember?

TS: Oh, yes. The 280 cash register. The banking terminal, the 270. The 280, the 270, the 399 accounting computer. I think that's all.

LM: Those were big products for NCR. The 270s, 280s especially. Of course we sold a lot of 399s, also.

TS: The 270, 280, all those projects were started and completed, thank God, during my tenure and that was exciting because they were all the first MOS [Metal Oxide Semiconductors] and they had started the circuit producing facility which eventually grew. I went out to Miamisburg [Ohio]. In fact, I still have some souvenirs from that thing. So we were doing a lot of things on the cutting edge at that time and the best news is, the products worked and were sold.

LM: Successful.


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TS: Very successful products. So that was a fun time. Oh, one product that we loved was the Electrobar. That was always a fun product. And then one day Eckdahl hired the McKenzie consulting group to come in and look at the overall structure of NCR and like all consulting groups, they had to do something dramatically different. "Well, you're vertically organized. You've got a vertical Engineering organization and . . . " blah, blah, blah. "No. It ought to be individual divisions around products." So they started. And at the same time we had that labor dispute in Dayton. We called them strikes at the time. We had the 399 product about to go into production. It had been pretty much all designed and ready to go. So one day Eckdahl called me in and he said, "Tom, we're going to start a division out in Wichita, Kansas, kind of around the nucleus of this little Standard Precision company we acquired when we bought Pete Scott's electronic company. Would you like to be General Manager?" And I said, "Of course. When do I leave?" He said, "Tomorrow." [TS and LM laugh.]
So at that point I headed for Wichita, Kansas, and there was an advanced force out there - Bob Heery and three or four engineering guys who hooked up with two of the engineering guys out of Standard Precision - Bob Schwimman and another guy named Bob Richardson - and they were beginning to start the engineering groundwork required to transfer that product from Dayton to Wichita and my task was kind of to begin supervising that operation and prepare for what eventually became 1,400 people out there at the plant. So, we undertook that and after . . . we had a couple of old Standard Precision buildings that we lived in and they had 425 employees, I think probably 300-400 that we retained which kind of gave us a head start. We had to convince 75 to 150 so people from Dayton to pack up and move to Wichita, Kansas. I look upon it as one of the greatest sales achievements of my life. But I had an awful lot of help. Bob Heery, Gary Moyer who went on to a 30-year career with NCR - he was the HR guy. All of us pitched in convincing people that they would love it in Wichita. As you probably know, they really turned out to love it because we recently, in June, had a reunion and we had 130 former employees from the 70s plus their wives and spouses, which added up to about 230 people show up for a reunion after 30 years. It's absolutely amazing.

LM: Don't I remember that when you first went out there weren't you working in trailers or something?

TS: Oh, we worked in everything. Yes. We had trailers, but the most exciting thing we worked in was the old horse barn for the Wichita trolley system which was our machine shop.

LM: I didn't know that.

TS: Yes. So that was a lot of fun. We didn't know it either. I didn't. I guess it was only people who grew up in Wichita. But I found it out when we had to dig up the parking lot which was were the stalls were. As soon as we took the asphalt off we thought there must have been a lot of horses around.

LM: You knew where you were.

TS: We knew we were in a horse barn. Yeah, we had trailers, we had horse barns, we had a little building over in the shopping center that had a very low ceiling. I can remember Frank Martin was about six foot and we sent him to manage that and, of course, he could never get his head up straight. And then we had another little building right behind the drive-in theater. And we lived in those buildings for two years and brought the production of the 399 thanks to Marv Crumm who was our Director of Manufacturing, and Ken Frost, who was our Director of QA. They got production moving and while we were still in those buildings and I had my office in the one by the drive-in theater, we were instructed to receive a number of people from Japan because production was going to be transferred to the plant in Japan, not completely Oiso, but that was where Asian production was going to take place. So we soon had the place . . . lots and lots of Japanese engineers, transferring the technology to them. During that time, I don't remember if Bill was President of NCR yet, but Bill Anderson came to visit. Because all the Japanese people had worked for him, he came to visit our little plant behind the drive-in theater. Bill was a rather . . . he was a tall and imposing man and the ceilings were kind of short, so as soon as I heard he was coming and came to my office, I immediately summoned the senior Japanese guys to come and see him. Well, they were so scared. I've never seen . . . those poor guys were just frightened to death. [TS and LM laugh.] But Bill was happy to see them and they got over the shakes and they were okay.

LM: He made a lot of people shake.

TS: Yeah, he did. But I thought he was a pretty good leader.

LM: He was necessary for NCR when he got here.

TS: Yeah. So we did a lot of interesting things. We built a new building. The building came up and we transferred everybody out of the temporary trailers and so forth into that one single building. And production kind of boomed and we got up to a high rate. Our cost effectiveness was very good. We had super-duper employee morale and we were able to attract some very unusually talented people. Of the some 130 employees that came back for the reunion, there were probably 20 or 30 people who were CEOs in later life. There were just so many success stories. Very, very good people which kind of made it an easy place to be.
So we really enjoyed our stay there and had a lot of fun. I don't know how many firsts we accomplished. Of course, we had that ball printer which certainly was a first. That was a bit of a challenge.

LM: Did we ever get that working?

TS: Oh, absolutely.

LM: How many characters a second. Do you remember?

TS: I think it was like 26 or 30 charaacters. It was absolutely fantastic.

LM: I always thought it was going to pound itself to death.

TS: That was a challenge. That was a real challenge. But we did get it to work. It served its purpose. I think it was such a transition. It was a time when Marketing people thought we had to have . . .

LM: The best and the cheapest . . .

TS: Well, not the best and the cheapest, but we still had to retain the ledger card, the magnetic-striped ledger cards and of course you had to print on them. Maybe we could have skipped that product and gone directly to a real computer. You know, I think in retrospect. As a Corporation, that was too big a step.

LM: Do they still have the magnetic stripe on the cards?

TS: Oh, yeah. We had the crazy card handler. We had this monster mechanism that would take the ledger cards . . . you would pile them on there. It would read them, and write them, and spit them back out. And you think today, what a crude system. But I guess the Marketing philosophy was, "Well, our customers all have tubs of ledger cards and they aren't ready to dump those tubs of ledger cards so here's a transition that they can feel comfortable with." And it didn't take long before that became obvious. We could have converted them faster and easier, but it worked and we sold quite a few machines.

LM: And we sold quite a few ledger cards.

TS: Yes. Yes, we did. It was a fun product. Then we brought on the 299 [an accounting computer] and the 499 [an accounting microcomputer], you know, a lower-cost version and a higher-cost version. And that was all new development out there. Then the 725 which was an in-store [data terminal] controller. That was an in-store controller product that we brought out. And then by that time I guess Eckdahl was sick of seeing me in Wichita so . . . that was at the time that CPI [Computer Peripherals Incorporated] was formed - the joint venture between Control Data [Corporation] and NCR.

LM: And one other . . .

TS: Nope. That was it. Control Data and NCR.

LM: I was thinking it was Honeywell, too.

TS: No. They were peripherally involved. Honeywell had a plant in Oak City, but somehow it was not actually part of CPI. Because Eckdahl asked me if I would go and become Executive Vice President of CPI. I agreed and I went to Minneapolis. That was a fascinating challenge. I was involved in some interesting history before that. When I was working on Jim Taylor's 640 printer, I contacted a company in California called Data Products that made printers and they had a very unique hammer bank that was completely different from the technology that we had. I made a deal with them to get the technology from their hammer bank for NCR. That was when I was Chief Engineer of the Data Terminals Division. That was going to replace this problematical spring-carried hammer that we had. And theirs was a very, very clever design. So we bought a license for their technology. We no more than acquired the license for their technology when CPI was formed and of course Control Data had a line of printers that competed with our 640 and with the Data Product printer. And before I got on board and have any leverage or influence, it was decided that the Control Data technology was better so NCR gave it back or sold it back for peanuts to Data Products. Data Products took the money that they made on the technology deal, automated the manufacture of their hammer bank and proceeded to kill CPI in the printer business . . . when I was running it. I thought, "This isn't fair." I could have had it had we stuck with what we were going to do at NCR on the printer side. That was a joint venture so everything is a compromise. That sort of sounded the death knell of my career at NCR after nine years. Since the people at Data Products knew me, they recruited me to go out and run manufacturing and operations for Data Products. So after a year at CPI, I said a fond farewell to my career at NCR and went out to the sunny shores of California and avoided the snows of Minnesota.
Well, it was fun. I had a great time. I had a wonderful time. Learned a lot. I owe a lot to the Don Eckdahls and the Bill Kesslers and a lot of the guys who worked for me. I learned as much from many of the people who worked for me as from the people I worked for.

LM: And this was your first job out of college?

TS: It wasn't my first job out of college. It was my first job out of graduate school. I had a couple of inconsequential jobs between getting out of college and going back to graduate school.

LM: Where did you do your undergraduate?

TS: At Clarkson College in, now called Clarkson University, in northern New York State. Then I went to the University of Pittsburgh and got my MS and Ph.D.

LM: So was NCR doing recruiting at the University of Pittsburgh when you talked to them?

TS: No, there was an ad in Mechanical Engineering magazine.

LM: Oh, you said that.

TS: And if anybody fit that ad, it was my background and experience - having started out as a mechanical engineer and then moved into engineering physics and electrical engineering. I said, "This sounds like me. Where can I apply?" So I immediately applied and was fortunate enough to get the job.

LM: Who did you interview here in Dayton?

TS: Frank Laub, Jim Taylor, Kessler, I think Carl Rench. I think I talked to Carl Rench. I'm sure I did. I know I did. So it was quite a thorough interview. I was lucky to get the job.

LM: Sounds like you were well qualified. Was Bob Mumma there?

TS: Oh, Bob Mumma used to work for me. Thank you. Bob Mumma was one of the guys. He was there big time. For a while he worked for me while I was Director of Engineering. Chuck - Charles, the guy I couldn't think of a while ago - Chuck Wilson. Thank you. That was the other guy. So now we got them - Leppla, Wilson, Mumma, Neubauer, Dave Zeh, I think that was probably it. Leppla was running the 270.

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