Unlike many tools for managing mainframe data, which are geared to the needs of professional programmers in MIS departments, NOMAD is particularly designed for (and sold to) application end-users in large corporations.
End-users employ Nomad in batch production cycles and in Web-enabled applications, as well as for reporting and distribution via the web or PC desktop.
The LIST command is somewhat analogous to the SQL SELECT statement, but incorporates formatting, totaling, and other elements helpful for tailoring output to a business requirement.
Another example of NOMAD's power is illustrated by Nicholas Rawlings in his comments for the Computer History Museum about NCSS (see citation below).
I used Martin's Engineer's Problem in hundreds of NOMAD classes, as I forced people to think in terms of sets of data, instead of record-at-a-time, which is how they'd been taught."
The NOMAD customer base expanded rapidly, as new categories of users adopted time-sharing data management tools to solve problems they previously could not tackle.
Training materials, such as Daniel McCracken's book (cited below), focused on these relational database features, and their use in rapid application development.
A simple methodology letting end-users design effective, normalized relational databases was soon added to the curriculum – and was later taught on campuses throughout the country, in the ACM Lectureship Series, by NCSS emeritus Lawrence Smith.
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).
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.
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.)
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.
This changed, marking the start of a new era when NOMAD2 was developed in 1982 in conjunction with major customer Bank of America,[4] It was released as a separate product under VM in 1982 and under MVS in 1983.
QLIST was added to the mainframe product line, providing a user-friendly environment for developing sophisticated reports without extensive knowledge of NOMAD syntax.
NOMAD remains an extremely stable product that is enhanced to keep up with contemporary needs, such as access to Oracle and SQL Server data on mid-tier platforms, full e-mail support and additional types of output formatted in HTML, XML, and PDF.
The basic philosophy of the NOMAD language, to simplify the application development and reporting processes with an intuitive and powerful syntax, is carried forward into the UltraQuest products.
UltraQuest Reporter applies a layer on top of the 4GL to make report-building even easier, without writing any syntax at all, employing an intuitive and powerful graphical user interface.
(A few large users like Bank of America and Standard Oil of California (SOCAL), had previously negotiated site licenses for their own VP/CSS datacenters, most of which ran NOMAD.