[1] In 1967, joined by Dick Orenstein (one of the authors of CTSS), the company began exploring the idea of offering time-sharing services based on CP/CMS.
NCSS achieved major successes with large banks, oil companies, pharmaceutical firms, and manufacturers, as well as many smaller clients.
Important application areas included database publishing, financial analysis/modeling, engineering, sales analysis, bill-of-materials processing, statistics/crosstabulation, mailing list administration, patent management, and interactive software development.
An innovative, nationwide packet-switched network, running primarily on DEC PDP-11s, provided access between modem banks and up to a dozen large IBM and Amdahl mainframes.
(An interprocess communication interface, for example, was implemented providing transparent read/write access between remote applications – using normal file system I/O, analogous to a UNIX pipe.
Feinleib relates a story about NCSS customer support, and how a problem at Bell Labs was resolved: One day something happened to the disk they had their files on.
[5]In this climate, NCSS built a strong support and consulting organization, able to help end-users bypass their in-house technical resources.
This organization allowed the NCSS sales force to ignore traditional data processing procurement routes; they could instead sell directly to line managers with discretionary budgets and revenue responsibility.
These changes fostered a transformation of business structures of the 80s and 90s, forcing technical resources to respond more directly to corporate and customer needs, and encouraging the creation of new user-centered methodologies (such as rapid prototyping and joint application design).
Its early technical team included leading lights from MIT and the CP/CMS community; and they in turn attracted other strong hires.
A major appeal was the fact that, aside from hardware vendors, NCSS was one of very few organizations doing large-scale in-house operating system development.
Moreover, the firm's small size, high-profile clients, and rapidly changing application needs meant that an individual developer or support person was likely to encounter many different challenging problems each month.
A lengthy New York Times article of 26 July 1981, by Vin McLellan, described how the NCSS master password list had been compromised – and how a thorough follow-up by the FBI became a learning experience for them.
The lessons learned – by NCSS, by D&B (its new masters), by the compromised clients, by the FBI, by the interested newspaper reporters, and ultimately by the reading public – helped raise awareness about security issues, in an industry that had been blithely indifferent to such risks.