 Logo used from 1964 to the late 1970s | |
 Original headquarters in Herkimer, New York | |
| Industry | Computer |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1964 in Herkimer, New York |
| Founders |
|
| Defunct | 1988 |
| Fate | Renamed Qantel Corporation in 1988; acquired by Decision Data Computer Corporation in 1992 |
| Successor | Qantel Corporation (1988–1992) |
Mohawk Data Sciences Corporation (MDS) was an early computer hardware company, started by former Univac engineers in 1964; [1] by 1985 they were struggling to sell off part of their company. [2]
The company was founded in Herkimer, New York, by George Cogar, Lauren King, and Ted Robinson, former Univac employees.[ citation needed ]
Their success in selling their first product, a Key-to-Tape Data Entry device that allowed doing away with Keypunch devices, brought them enough cash to also grow via acquisition.
Among their acquisitions was Atron Corporation, developer of a minicomputer, the Atron 501 and 502. From the know-how acquired and absorbed, Mohawk expanded into the areas of controlling line printers and also Remote Job Entry (RJE). This was the basis of their MDS 2400 RJE product, [3] which supported 2780 [4] and HASP.
Another major acquisition was Anelex Corporation of Boston, at the time the second-largest manufacturer of printers behind IBM and an early entrant in the hard disk drive market. Mohawk finalized their acquisition of Anelex in October 1967. [5] [6]
Financial difficulties a decade-and-a-half [1] after the company opened led to the company's restructuring, renaming and eventual takeover. By that time, headquarters had been in Parsippany, New Jersey, with manufacturing in Herkimer. [2]
Mohawk acquired Qantel Corporation [9] in 1980, later called "its strongest asset". [2] Having sold around 10,000 systems worldwide, in the sports world it was known as the supplier for the computer hardware and software for "12 of the 28 teams in the National Football League". [10]
Mohawk renamed itself Qantel in 1988, [11] and in 1992 the remains of the latter, after bankruptcy, was acquired by Decision Data Computer Corporation. [12]
The MDS Series 21 (21/20, 21/40, 21/50) was configured as a CRT (which Mohawk called an "Operator Station") and a system unit (called a "Controller Console"). [4] : Intro_p.3 Up to four floppy disk drives could be housed in the latter.
Mohawk's MOBOL—Mohawk Business Oriented Language—was described as "look[ing] nothing like COBOL". [13] [14]
The language's source code was compiled, rather than being run interpretively. [4]
After a MOBOL program was compiled, a utility named MOBOLIST was used to display applicable messages (if any) for errors detected during compilation. [4] : Intro_p.1
The syntax (5,1) 'Hello, World' would output Hello, World to the screen at the beginning of the fifth line.
The TRS-80 Micro Computer System is a desktop microcomputer launched in 1977 and sold by Tandy Corporation through their Radio Shack stores. The name is an abbreviation of Tandy Radio Shack, Z80 [microprocessor]. It is one of the earliest mass-produced and mass-marketed retail home computers.
Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a mainframe and supercomputer company that in the 1960s was one of the nine major U.S. computer companies, which group included IBM, the Burroughs Corporation, and the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), the NCR Corporation (NCR), General Electric, and Honeywell, RCA and UNIVAC. For most of the 1960s, the strength of CDC was the work of the electrical engineer Seymour Cray who developed a series of fast computers, then considered the fastest computing machines in the world; in the 1970s, Cray left the Control Data Corporation and founded Cray Research (CRI) to design and make supercomputers. In 1988, after much financial loss, the Control Data Corporation began withdrawing from making computers and sold the affiliated companies of CDC; in 1992, Cray established Control Data Systems, Inc. The remaining affiliate companies of CDC currently do business as the software company Ceridian.
FLOW-MATIC, originally known as B-0, was the first English-like data processing language. It was developed for the UNIVAC I at Remington Rand under Grace Hopper from 1955 to 1959, and helped shape the development of COBOL.
UNIVAC was a line of electronic digital stored-program computers starting with the products of the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation. Later the name was applied to a division of the Remington Rand company and successor organizations.
A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that can be used for entering data into, and transcribing data from, a computer or a computing system. Most early computers only had a front panel to input or display bits and had to be connected to a terminal to print or input text through a keyboard. Teleprinters were used as early-day hard-copy terminals and predated the use of a computer screen by decades. The computer would typically transmit a line of data which would be printed on paper, and accept a line of data from a keyboard over a serial or other interface. Starting in the mid-1970s with microcomputers such as the Sphere 1, Sol-20, and Apple I, display circuitry and keyboards began to be integrated into personal and workstation computer systems, with the computer handling character generation and outputting to a CRT display such as a computer monitor or, sometimes, a consumer TV, but most larger computers continued to require terminals.
Remington Rand, Inc. was an early American business machine manufacturer, originally a typewriter manufacturer and in a later incarnation the manufacturer of the UNIVAC line of mainframe computers. Formed in 1927 following a merger, Remington Rand was a diversified conglomerate making other office equipment, electric shavers, etc. The Remington Rand Building at 315 Park Avenue South in New York City is a 20-floor skyscraper completed in 1911. After 1955, Remington Rand had a long series of mergers and acquisitions that eventually resulted in the formation of Unisys.
In computer science, group coded recording or group code recording (GCR) refers to several distinct but related encoding methods for representing data on magnetic media. The first, used in 6250 bpi magnetic tape since 1973, is an error-correcting code combined with a run-length limited (RLL) encoding scheme, belonging into the group of modulation codes. The others are different mainframe hard disk as well as floppy disk encoding methods used in some microcomputers until the late 1980s. GCR is a modified form of a NRZI code, but necessarily with a higher transition density.
The IBM 3790 Communications System was one of the first distributed computing platforms. The 3790 was developed by IBM's Data Processing Division (DPD) and announced in 1974. It preceded the IBM 8100, announced in 1979.
Remote job entry, or Remote Batch, is the procedure for sending requests for non-interactive data processing tasks (jobs) to mainframe computers from remote workstations, and by extension the process of receiving the output from such jobs at a remote workstation.
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The Apricot PC is a personal computer produced by Apricot Computers, then still known as Applied Computer Techniques or ACT. Released in late 1983, it was ACT's first independently developed microcomputer, following on from the company's role of marketing and selling the ACT Sirius 1, and was described as "the first 16-bit system to be Sirius-compatible, rather than IBM-compatible", indicating the influence that the Sirius 1 had in the United Kingdom at the time.
George R. Cogar was an American computer scientist and engineer. He was the head of the UNIVAC 1004 electronic design team code named the "bumblebee project", and later the "barn project", and co-founder of Mohawk Data Sciences Corporation, a Herkimer, New York-based multimillion-dollar business. His most successful invention was the Data Recorder magnetic tape encoder, which was introduced in 1965 and eliminated the need for keypunches and punched cards by direct encoding on tape. He also founded the Cogar Corporation, where he built an intelligent terminal—an early forerunner of the modern personal computer—which he called the Cogar System 4 or Cogar 4. The Cogar 4 became the Singer 1500 after Singer Business Machines acquired Cogar Corporation. In 1976 International Computers Limited (ICL) acquired Singer Business Machines, changing the name of the computer to the ICL 1500.
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The MDS 2400 was a small floor-standing computer manufactured by Mohawk Data Sciences Corporation. The machine was originally developed by Atron Corporation as the Atron 501 Datamanager, introduced in 1969. It was marketed primarily for remote job entry applications and promoted as The Peripheral Processor.
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Decision Data Computer Corporation, later Decision Industries Corporation and Decision Data Inc., was an American computer hardware company founded in 1969 and based in Horsham, Pennsylvania.
Anelex Corporation was an American computer hardware company active from 1952 to 1967 and based primarily in Boston, Massachusetts. It was founded by E. Ross Anderson and closely tied to Anderson-Nichols & Co., a manufacturing company based in Boston which Anderson had co-founded in 1922. Both were based out of the same building, with Anelex eventually absorbing Anderson-Nichols.
The Mohawk Data Sciences Corporation, which has strived unsuccessfully for months to sell many of its operations, said yesterday that ...
... MOBOL Compiler ... BSC2780 ...
differs from the traditional Cobol ... MOBOL (MOhawk Business Oriented La...
written in MOBOL (Mohawk Business Oriented Language), which looked nothing like COBOL