The office solutionary: On the 100th birthday of Heinz Nixdorf

Contents

Heinz Nixdorf was born in Paderborn 100 years ago. His company was one of the companies that established mid-range data technology with electrical computers that facilitated balancing and account assignment in bookkeeping. At times, Nixdorf Computer AG had 250,000 employees and operated in 44 countries.

Growing up in poverty

Heinz Nixdorf was born in Paderborn on April 9, 1925 as the first child of Walter Hermann and Änne Nixdorf. His father was a trained baker, his mother a housewife. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Torgau, where his father sold knitwear as a traveling salesman. In 1929, the growing family had to return to Paderborn because a fire destroyed the warehouse. In Paderborn, the family lived in cramped conditions and great poverty due to the global economic crisis. Heinz Nixdorf started school in 1931 and already excelled in mathematics at elementary school. Despite good grades, it was not enough for him to attend secondary school, which the family could not afford.

In May 1939, the 14-year-old Nixdorf therefore transferred to one of the new teacher training colleges, which the National Socialist regime used to combat the shortage of primary school teachers. He was able to pass the Hitler Youth "probationary test" (a stay in a camp) required for admission.

Nixdorf began his teacher training in Vallendar-Schönstatt and was later transferred to Alfeld an der Leine near Hanover, where he learned to glide on the side. As a course participant (called a Jungmann at the time), Nixdorf had to wear a uniform and regularly take part in work duties. In May 1942, Nixdorf broke off his teacher training and was finally able to attend the Reismann-Gymnasium in Paderborn after four months. During the waiting period, he developed logarithm tables and studied Fermat's theorem.

Military service, end of the war and studies

At grammar school, Nixdorf was top of his class in mathematics and physics, but had to leave in 1943 because he was called up for military service. He was part of a RAD unit that repaired the damage after the Möhne disaster. In the fall of 1943, he was drafted into military service and, as an enthusiastic glider pilot, registered for an officer's career in the Luftwaffe. He joined the NSDAP retroactively on April 20, 1943 (Hitler's birthday). His officer training was brief, as the air force school was already disbanded in 1944 and Nixdorf was transferred to Panzer Division 1 Hermann Göring. He experienced the end of the war with a battle in the Großenhain area near Dresden. While the majority of the troops were taken prisoner of war, Nixdorf was able to escape and make his way to Paderborn on foot via Czechoslovakia. Here, in 1947, he was one of the first returnees to take his A-levels at the age of 22. In his admission to the Abitur examination, he wrote: "The collapse of Germany caused a world of hopes and ideals to crumble within me. What I had previously considered to be the highest now seemed small and worthless. Only slowly did I find my way back to myself."

Mentor Walter Sprick

From the winter semester of 1947/48, Heinz Nixdorf was enrolled to study physics at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, with a minor in business administration. He came into contact with the US company Remington Rand early on as a student trainee and met his great mentor Walter Sprick there. Sprick had previously worked in the Bayreuth subcamp during the Nazi era on a computer-controlled target recognition process in the "television weapon project", which was intended to produce the "seeing bomb".

Sprick had lived and married in Paderborn and constructed a computer for fire insurance in Kiel immediately after the war. Sprick then headed the development laboratory at Remington Rand, where Nixdorf worked from December 1951. Nixdorf was in his seventh semester at the time. The two quickly became friends and had big plans. Nixdorf's biographer Christian Berg writes: "...since the beginning of 1952 at the latest, he and Sprick had been quietly planning to develop and sell tube-based computing devices for insurance companies and other large corporations.

Electron multiplier

The first concrete ideas for founding a company were that both Nixdorf and Sprick should each hold 42.5 percent of the shares in the future company. The remainder was to be given to an interested investor who was to contribute the necessary capital to the company. These plans came to nothing, as Sprick accepted a position at IBM Germany. Secretly, however, he assured Nixdorf of his cooperation (and the use of his patents), which was of great importance for the first order of the Laboratory for Pulse Technology on July 1, 1952 in Essen. Nixdorf had an order from RWE for an "electronic computing device at a price of approx. 25,000 DM". Together with his first employee Alfred Wiercioch, Nixdorf built a device that scanned and stored the punched cards with photocells, calculated a value and printed the result. This divider could process 9000 punched cards per hour; the technology came from the computer built by Sprick in Kiel.

While this computer has been lost, there is a replica of the second Nixdorf computer, an "Elektronensaldierer", which can be found in the Heinz Nixdorf Museumsforum (HNF) in Paderborn. This "ES 24" was followed by the "EM 20" electron multiplier. The decisive factor was that Nixdorf was able to emancipate itself from the client RWE and was also able to sell these punch card control units to Bull. IBM's French competitor in punch card technology sold the devices adapted to its punch card machines under its own name.

By 1955, Nixdorf's young company already had seven employees and moved to Paderborn in 1957. From 1951, the office machine manufacturer Wanderer was the general agent of the Compagnie des Machines Bull and thus also responsible for the delivery of the additional devices in Germany. The central administration of Kaufhof in Cologne, which processed 40 million punched cards in 1960, was full of praise for the four multipliers used. Because a new punched card machine called Gamma 172 based on transistor technology was being developed at Bull during this time, the French company signed an exclusive contract with the laboratory for pulse technology. Nixdorf's company was to work exclusively for Bull for five years and was not allowed to supply any German or American competitors apart from Wanderer-Werke with its Exacta office machines. So the Paderborn company set about adapting its multiplier to the Exacta Multitronic 6000, of which Wanderer ordered 70 for DM 493,500. This proved to be a life-saving measure for Nixdorf's company when Bull was on the verge of bankruptcy in 1963.

Foundation stone of Nixdorf Computer AG

Heinz Nixdorf had met the computer designer Otto Müller at a trade fair in Hanover. In 1964, Müller, who was working at IBM Research in the USA, moved to Paderborn and became chief developer of a fully transistorized, partially programmable invoicing machine in the laboratory for pulse technology, which was launched on the market in 1965 under the name Wanderer Logatronic or Praetor. This name was used by the company Ruf-Buchhaltung, which was involved in the development of the invoicing machine. Whether Logatronic or Praetor, the desk calculator conquered German offices as the Nixdorf 820 and formed the cornerstone of Nixdorf Computer AG (NCAG). As early as 1963, Nixdorf's engineers began testing an IBM ball-head typewriter in continuous operation and connecting it to a memory unit, then developing an account printer with a magnetic strip for it. Depending on the intended use, magnetic tape or punch card readers could be installed in the modular system.

In 1968, 4000 of these devices were sold in Germany alone when Nixdorf Computer AG was founded. Behind the backs of the managers of Wanderer-Werke, which had been in serious difficulties since 1967, the Dresdener Bank, Wanderer's main shareholder, offered the company for sale. The Nixdorf couple acquired Wanderer for DM 8 million and the new Nixdorf AG took over Wanderer liabilities of DM 9 million. While the workforce of the Wanderer works in Cologne was halved and the factory fell into a kind of slumber, Nixdorf took over 70 general agencies of the company in Germany and 30 branches in Europe. This powerful sales organization was able to outperform competitors of equal standing such as Kienzle and Diehl. In 1969, NCAG had 2000 employees and a turnover of over DM 100 million.

Rise to a global company

The Nixdorf 820, which was subsequently upgraded with a floppy disk, was the mainstay of sales at NCAG until the mid-1970s, as the company slowly established itself as a global player. In 1972, the headquarters building was constructed in Paderborn, Westphalia, as a scaled-down copy of the skyscraper that Mies van der Rohe had designed for Seagram & Sons -- it is now the HNF, where Nixdorf's birthday is celebrated today by the father of the state, Hendrik Wüst. The company worked together with the US company Entrex, which manufactured the cheap data acquisition stations called System 620 for Nixdorf. They were connected to the 880 magnetic disk storage system and later to the Nixdorf 8850.

A spectacular hit was scored in 1980 when the US census was carried out using Nixdorf computers and 550 data collection stations. Nixdorf had already bought Entrex by then. While many companies in this "medium data technology" sector, such as Taylorix or ICL, fell into crisis at the beginning of the 1980s, Nixdorf remained stable. The edgy IT journalist Dieter Eckbauer wrote about Nixdorf in his Computerwoche magazine that NCAG's success was "clearly based on selling security through all-round support, organizational curd with cream - no black boxes. You don't have to tell the Paderborn company how to grab the owners and managers of small and medium-sized enterprises." Nixdorf scored with its sales organization, not necessarily with cutting-edge technology.

Idea for the CeBIT

Nevertheless, in the 1980s, Nixdorf began thinking about how to produce the organizational curd with cream more cheaply. The enormous vertical range of manufacture with correspondingly costly warehousing was to be reduced, and the various operating systems were to be standardized. The PC played no role in this - a famous aperçu on this subject by Heinz Nixdorf exists in three proven versions: "We don't build mopeds/goggomobiles/mopeds". This was not a rejection of the PC, but of the production of these IBM- or Apple-compatible computers, for which Apple had launched an inquiry. With the Nixdorf 8810 M25, the company had a Panasonic drag-top for field service in its program. The strategy pointed more in the direction of Unix.

Nixdorf Computer AG became a member of X/Open in 1984 and, in collaboration with the US company Pyramid, planned a system family called Targon, with a Targon /31 and a Targon /35. The fault-tolerant computer Nixdorf 8832, developed shortly beforehand by computer scientist Anita Borg, was renamed Targon /32 without further ado. But the computer world was puzzled as to how Unix, established at universities, would fare in the office world of "medium data technology". Heinz Nixdorf did not live to see how this story ended. He celebrated his last great success when, as a long-standing exhibitor, he was able to convince the Hannover Messe to dissolve the office machine hall and organize it as an independent trade fair. He died of a heart attack at the first CeBIT in 1986.

Birthday events at the HNF

To mark Heinz Nixdorf's 100th birthday, the HNF is organizing a series of events listed under Nixdorf 100. A newly designed Nixdorf area is being opened today and in the foyer of the museum you can see a Ro 80 driven by his chauffeur and foreman Josef Pieper. From April 9 to 13, admission is free. If you take the escalators up to the museum, this is also a legacy of Heinz Nixdorf: the energetic Westphalian hated waiting for the elevator. In November, a scientific congress on computers in Germany will round off the Nixdorf year.

(wpl)