NCR

John H. Patterson bought the company behind James Ritty's "incorruptible cashier" in 1884 and renamed it National Cash Register. His contribution was less the machine than the selling: sales territories, quotas, a rehearsed script and formal training for salesmen, a method the young Thomas J. Watson took with him to IBM after Patterson fired him in 1914. During the Second World War NCR engineer Joseph Desch built the US Navy's Bombe machines in Dayton, which broke the German navy's Enigma traffic.

Computers arrived with the purchase of Computer Research Corporation in 1953, and in 1974 the world's first UPC barcode was scanned on an NCR scanner in a supermarket in Troy, Ohio. AT&T bought the company in 1991 for 7.4 billion dollars and let it go again in 1996 after a failed merger; the data warehouse firm Teradata, bought in 1991, was spun off in 2007. ATMs and point-of-sale systems carried NCR into the 2000s, and in 2023 it split into NCR Voyix (retail) and NCR Atleos (ATMs).