Launch of the System 3600 is the latest step in an innovative transformation of its product line that began way back in 1976 when the Dayton company launched the upwards-compatible Criterion 8500 mainframe to succeed its original Century machines: the ageing Centuries had fallen way behind the performance of the leading mainframes of the time and once customers ran out of steam, NCR had little alternative but to give them the phone number of IBM Corp’s nearest sales office; the company didn’t have the resources to design and build a competitive machine using the then traditional technology and methods: instead it became the first to design a mainframe using minicomputer-style bus architecture, and assigned many of the tasks normally handled by a monolithic central processor to a collection of special function, mainly merchant microprocessors hanging off the bus, so that with only a modest power central processing unit, the complex could match the performance of the biggest mainframes in the market – and cost NCR much less to build.
