Development: Late 1970s
Nomad was the flagship NCSS product during the firm's years of rapid growth, going through a series of releases and receiving a major share of this (publicly-traded) company's R&D, sales, support, and other resources.
NCSS and its time-sharing competitors primarily sold services to large corporations, at a time when most MIS departments were bogged down on huge COBOL implementation projects (see Brooks's famous The Mythical Man-Month for the contemporary mind-set). Because of development backlogs, outside services like NCSS became attractive. Tools like Nomad made end-users self-sufficient: If they had discretionary budgets, and could get the necessary raw data from their MIS departments, then they could solve their own information problems. Many users were content to answer seemingly simple aggregate reporting questions that baffled the MIS departments of the day – like "rank departments by profitability." Other end-users went beyond basic reporting to build large, mission-critical applications, either by learning the necessary skills, or by hiring their own technicians who didn't report through the MIS hierarchy. NCSS developed a large support infrastructure, including training, consulting, and other services, to foster end-user independence. (Dissatisfaction with traditional MIS methods and resources would later also fuel the personal computer revolution, which in turn would displace time-sharing vendors like NCSS.)
In the late 70s, NCSS developed a 'mini-370' product called the NCSS 3200, primarily intended as an in-house platform for running Nomad under the NCSS operating system VP/CSS (see below). The small, low-cost system was sold as an end-user 'database machine' or 'information warehouse' for extracting and analyzing corporate datasets – analogous to the dedicated mainframes installed at some of NCSS's larger customer sites. Despite limited success, the company lost interest in the 3200 venture, which was scrapped along with the VP/CSS operating system.
Read more about this topic: Nomad Software
Famous quotes containing the word late:
“Which form of proverb do you prefer—”Better late than never,” or “Better never than late”?”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)