National CSS

National CSS, Inc. (NCSS) was a time-sharing firm in the 1960-80s, until its acquisition by Dun & Bradstreet in 1979. NCSS was originally headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut, but relocated to Wilton in 1978. Sales offices, data centers, and development facilities were located at various sites throughout the U.S. Some additional sales offices were active in the UK and elsewhere.

The firm began life in 1966 as Computer Software Systems, a consulting firm headed by Bob Bernard. 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. After IBM released CP/CMS under the IBM Type-III Library in 1968, and thus became available to CSS, this dream became possible. The small firm persuaded IBM to take an order for a S/360-67, and key technical people were recruited. The machine was delivered in November 1968. Harold Feinleib, an early recruit from MIT, describes the situation:

I couldn’t imagine what the IBM people must have been thinking. This machine cost

close to $100K a month to rent so I am sure they were quite concerned to accept the order from a couple of young guys. Even most big companies didn’t have machines this

By December 1968, the firm was reselling time. Needing more capital to expand, the company went public in 1970, changing its name to "National CSS" (because "CSS" was not available nationwide). After a couple of hard years, business took off in the mid 70s.

NCSS was best known for two products: the VP/CSS operating system, and the NOMAD database system.

When NCSS began selling remote access to its computers, it was selling to an industry where in-house programmers did their development via batch processing on punched cards. Feinleib describes their early appeal:

In those days, COBOL programmers could get one or possibly two turnarounds a day because their in-house machines were used for production work most of the time. They worked with punched cards, so any slight error would waste a run and a whole day. On our system, which used the same IBM COBOL compiler, they could get dozens of turnarounds a day. They would use an IBM Selectric Typewriter terminal to edit and enter their program, and then they could run and debug it. We enabled them to put in test data and even added a symbolic debugger so they could debug their programs interactively. This program development service sold like hot-cakes

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