Network Computing Devices

» see ncd.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Six people started Network Computing Devices in Mountain View in 1987, one of them Martin Eberhard, who would go on to co-found Tesla. Judith Estrin and William Carrico arrived about six months in as chief executive and executive vice president, and took the company public on Nasdaq in June 1992 under the ticker NCDI. The product was the X terminal, and for a while NCD was the biggest name selling one.

The pitch was arithmetic. A Unix workstation cost real money per seat, and most of the people sitting in front of one were reading mail or editing files. An X terminal gave you the screen and the keyboard with no disk underneath them, running X11 against a server in the machine room and leaving nothing local to maintain. NCD supported TCP/IP alongside the DECnet and Token Ring networks that corporate sites actually had, and wrote the Network Audio System so sound could travel the same way the pixels did.

The money tells the story cleanly. Net revenues went from $120.3 million in 1992 to $144.3 million in 1993 to $160.9 million in 1994, which was both the best year the company ever had and the first year it lost money, $10.8 million of it. Cheap PCs were eating into the reason the category existed. NCD restructured in the third quarter of 1995 at a cost of $7.5 million and was down to 321 employees by the end of 1996, never earning back the peak.

~ the record ~

~ what an x terminal was for ~

I came into university labs in Turkey in the 2000s, by which point every desk had a PC under it and the diskless terminal was already history. Everything an X terminal promised, a cheap endpoint managed centrally with your session waiting for you at any desk, is what a browser tab does now. NCD spent its last decade selling the right idea in the wrong box.

~ the year the revenue peaked ~

NCD kept buying its way into adjacent software through the good years. It bought Graphic Software Systems in 1992 and shipped PC-XWARE in 1993, so a Windows PC could pretend to be an X terminal. The head office later moved from Mountain View to Beaverton, Oregon, which is where the company died. Z-Code Software and its Z-Mail client followed in 1994, later sold on to NetManage. Tektronix's X terminal line came over in 1998.

None of it changed the direction. By the quarter ending 31 March 2002, the last financial statement the company ever filed, NCD was reporting $4 million in hardware sales and $530,000 in software, roughly half what it had taken in the same quarter a year earlier. There were no filings after that. The registration was eventually revoked.

~ the memo to the staff ~

The Register got hold of the internal memo and published it on 13 December 2004. "NCD is currently in the process of ceasing operations," it read. "The company will close operations on December 31, 2004." Reporters calling the main line and the technical support line got answering machines. The chief executive and the finance chief did not return calls, and a spokeswoman said the company had no comment.

No announcement was ever made. Nobody issued a press release, and no bankruptcy filing ever turned up, even though the stock was still trading on the pink sheets. On the first Friday of 2005 it closed at nine tenths of a cent.

~ who picked up the customers ~

Five former employees started a software company called ThinPath Systems, named after the software line NCD had been selling, and took on the job of answering the phone for everyone left holding the hardware. A man named Bill Steele was wrapping up what remained of the company and would not discuss it either. The domain is a dental insurance business now.

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