NEAT3. I don't remember the model of the computer. It used punch cards for input.
I *think* all the early NCR mainframes and minis (at least by 1973/4) ran :- Neat/3, Cobol, Fortran and Basic.
I spent a lot of time fixing punch card reader/writers. I hated the things with a passion, that only diminished the first time one of NCR's "legendary' flying head disc packs crashed and I got the job of cleaning it up and fitting a new head so that the customer's IT staff could try and recover data (Back-ups, we don't need no steenking back-ups).
Whilst at NCR I interspersed my computer work with fixing cash registers and accounting machines. I loved the beautiful mechanical complexity of the type 33 accounting machines. I was so determined to fix one once (the root cause of the problem was the heavy grease Dayton used to cost the bottom level "storage" racks with thinking that this would be a good idea for machines going to tropic Australia. This machine came from the former Gold Mining town of Charters Towers and decades of dust had turned the aforementioned grease into concrete.
Fixing it involved pulling the machine down more or less to component parts and cleaning it out (I used a steam cleaner)
Int he course of of putting it back together I had to order some parts that were not on the normal service fiche. This excited the interest of someone in Dayton who ended up telling me that:-
Field stripping a 33 to the extent I had was not an approved procedure, that tech orders required that the machine frame be returned to Dayton for re-working (but the re-working line had closed 10 years previous, and that the only reason he was going to allow the parts to be sent was that nobody else was ever going to use them and that once I admitted that I could not make it work correctly I would research and follow tech orders in future.
Well, I did put it back together and it did work correctly - passing the new machine 24 hour self test with flying colours.
Sadly the company that owned it had quietly gone bust and shut the doors in the interim.
My boss was not happy at the amount of time that had gone into the machine with no invoiceable outcome. He arranged fro a local museum to collect it, where it is to this day, probably the best condition mechanical adding machine - anywhere....
I left NCR shortly after and went to University to do my first round of Uni studies.
Very occasionally I run into old NCR comrades. The one sI felt quite sorry for were the old school techs who could fix mechanical cash registers and accounting machines in their sleep. Many of them failed to make the transition to electronic cash registers and computers and slowly fell by the wayside as the machines they knew simply faded away.
I feared that the same thing would happen with the new wave machines which is why I decided to leave. The ultimate outcome for NCR and indeed the whole accounting machine industry is proof that I made the right call.
