Nixdorf Computer AG

~ the obituary ~

Nixdorf never sold anything you could take home. Its machines went behind bank counters and into the back offices of firms with a couple of hundred employees, which is the one part of computing that a child never sees and a hobbyist never touches. I have no memory of the name from the eighties and would not expect one. By october 1990, when the company stopped being a company, I was six.

Heinz Nixdorf started it on 1 july 1952 in Essen with 30,000 marks advanced by the RWE power utility, under the name Labor für Impulstechnik. He was 27. The bet he made was that computing did not have to live in a machine room that departments rented time on. Put a small one directly in the office that needs it, sized for the work in front of it, and the economics change completely. He was roughly fifteen years early and he was right.

In april 1968 he bought the Cologne firm Wanderer-Werke for 17.5 million marks and took its listing with it, becoming Nixdorf Computer AG on 1 october of that year. The headquarters went to Paderborn, where he had grown up. The 820 system that came out of this period was the product the whole company was built on, a desk-sized machine for accounting and invoicing sold to businesses that had never owned a computer of any kind.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

Revenue went from 28 million marks in 1966 to 263 million in 1970 and past a billion by 1978, compounding at something like twenty percent a year for a decade and a half. By 1985 the company was doing four billion marks in sales with 23,000 people across 44 countries, which made it the fourth largest computer company in Europe. Profit peaked the following year at 264 million marks. Nixdorf sold banking terminals and retail point of sale hardware, and by the late eighties it was badging IBM-compatible mainframes of its own.

Heinz Nixdorf died of a heart attack on 17 march 1986 on the CeBIT floor in Hannover, at the trade fair his own company had helped make important. He was 60.

~ the slide ~

Klaus Luft took over and inherited a problem that was not really his. The entire business was proprietary mid-range machines sold with the software and the service welded on, which is a fine model right up until standard PCs on a network can do the same job for a fraction of the money. The company kept building its own architectures while the market moved to parts anyone could order from a catalog.

Profit fell to 26 million marks in 1988, down ninety percent in two years. Then 1989 opened with a first-half loss of 297 million and closed with a second half close to twice that. Luft resigned. A company that had been a point of national pride was suddenly a rescue case, and West German industry does not leave those lying around for long.

~ what really happened ~

Siemens took a majority holding in early 1990 for something around $350 million, which for a business that had turned over five billion marks the year before was a salvage price. On 1 october 1990 the deal completed and Nixdorf Computer AG was merged with Siemens' own data systems division to form Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme. Roughly 28,000 people came across with it and a great many of them did not stay.

~ what it became ~

The hyphenated name lasted nine years. In 1999 the retail and banking half was sold to investors as Wincor Nixdorf. It went public in 2004 and merged with the American ATM maker Diebold in 2016. So the surviving fragment of Heinz Nixdorf's company is the thing that counts cash into your hand at a machine outside a bank, which is not far off what he was already selling in 1970.

Paderborn kept the rest. The Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum opened there in 1996 and is the largest computer museum in the world, which is a strange afterlife for a man who spent his career arguing that computers belonged in the room with the person doing the work.

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