Network Computing Devices - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Network Computing Devices (NCD) was a company founded in 1987 to produce a new class of products now known as a "thin client

Thin client

A thin client is a computer or a computer program which depends heavily on some other computer to fulfill its traditional computational roles. This stands in contrast to the traditional fat client, a computer designed to take on these roles by itself...

". It was founded in Mountain View, CA, and when it closed it was headquartered in Portland, Oregon

Portland, Oregon

Portland is a city located in the Pacific Northwest, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the U.S. state of Oregon. As of the 2010 Census, it had a population of 583,776, making it the 29th most populous city in the United States...

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The corporate founders were Mike Harrigan, Doug Klein, Dave Cornelius, Ed Basart, Martin Eberhard

Martin Eberhard

Martin Eberhard is co-founder and former CEO of Tesla Motors, an electric car company in San Carlos, California. He was born in Berkeley, California on May 15, 1960....

, and Kevin Martin.

At that time these devices were known as network terminals or X Terminals. Judith Estrin

Judith Estrin

Judith "Judy" L. Estrin is an American business executive. She is currently the CEO of JLabs , through which she pursues a broad range of advisory activities including sitting on corporate and advisory boards and speaking engagements...

and William Carrico joined the company about 6 months after its founding as its new CEO and executive vice president

Vice president

A vice president is an officer in government or business who is below a president in rank. The name comes from the Latin vice meaning 'in place of'. In some countries, the vice president is called the deputy president...

, and led the company through its IPO in 1992. The products were some of the earliest examples of a thin client and providing remote access

Remote access

In telecommunication, the term remote access has the following meanings:#Pertaining to communication with a data processing facility from a remote location or facility through a data link...

to data in something other than ASCII

ASCII

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...

as was common with traditional terminals of the time.

The X Protocol provided a way to show high resolution images of data and graphics over a network connection. NCD supported a range of network protocols including TCP/IP, Token-Ring, DECnet

DECnet

DECnet is a suite of network protocols created by Digital Equipment Corporation, originally released in 1975 in order to connect two PDP-11 minicomputers. It evolved into one of the first peer-to-peer network architectures, thus transforming DEC into a networking powerhouse in the 1980s...

and others.

Acquisitions

NCD purchased PCXware, which made an X Window System

X Window System

The X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...

for Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

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NCD purchased Z-Code Software in 1994. Z-Code made Z-Mail, a cross platform open standards email client. Z-Mail was later sold by NCD to Netmanage

NetManage

NetManage Inc. was a software company based in Cupertino, California, founded in 1990 by Zvi Alon, an Israeli engineer . The company’s development centre was located at the MATAM technology park, in Haifa, Israel...

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NCD purchased TekXPress X-terminals line from Tektronix

Tektronix

Tektronix, Inc. is an American company best known for its test and measurement equipment such as oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and video and mobile test protocol equipment. In November 2007, Tektronix became a subsidiary of Danaher Corporation....

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NCD ceased operations in 2004. However, a few of the company's employees have set up a new company, ThinPATH Systems, to provide former NCD customers and others with service, support and products.

External links

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