Transaction Management eXecutive
Encyclopedia
Transaction Management eXecutive or TMX was NCR Corporation
's proprietary
transaction processing system
running on NCR Tower 5000-series systems which were based on Motorola
680xx CPUs. This system was used mainly by financial institutions in the 1980s and 1990s.
Basic features of the TMX operating system
are listed below:
NCR Tower 5000 systems were also capable of running UNIX
SVR3 version.
NCR Corporation
NCR Corporation is an American technology company specializing in kiosk products for the retail, financial, travel, healthcare, food service, entertainment, gaming and public sector industries. Its main products are self-service kiosks, point-of-sale terminals, automated teller machines, check...
's proprietary
Proprietary software
Proprietary software is computer software licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder. The licensee is given the right to use the software under certain conditions, while restricted from other uses, such as modification, further distribution, or reverse engineering.Complementary...
transaction processing system
Transaction Processing System
A transaction processing system is a type of information system. TPSs collect, store, modify, and retrieve the transactions of an organization. A transaction is an event that generates or modifies data that is eventually stored in an information system. To be considered a transaction processing...
running on NCR Tower 5000-series systems which were based on Motorola
Motorola
Motorola, Inc. was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, which was eventually divided into two independent public companies, Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions on January 4, 2011, after losing $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009...
680xx CPUs. This system was used mainly by financial institutions in the 1980s and 1990s.
Basic features of the TMX operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
are listed below:
- It was a multiuser, multitaskingComputer multitaskingIn computing, multitasking is a method where multiple tasks, also known as processes, share common processing resources such as a CPU. In the case of a computer with a single CPU, only one task is said to be running at any point in time, meaning that the CPU is actively executing instructions for...
32-bit32-bitThe range of integer values that can be stored in 32 bits is 0 through 4,294,967,295. Hence, a processor with 32-bit memory addresses can directly access 4 GB of byte-addressable memory....
operating system. - It featured a proprietaryProprietary hardwareProprietary hardware is computer hardware which is owned by the proprietor.Historically, most early computer hardware was designed as proprietary until the 1980s, when IBM PC changed this paradigm...
networkComputer networkA computer network, often simply referred to as a network, is a collection of hardware components and computers interconnected by communication channels that allow sharing of resources and information....
called LBN (Local Branch Network). - Later versions of TMX had Token-Ring support which was called LBN Emulation.
- It had device support for financial applications on LBN, e.g. NCR dumb terminals, passbookPassbookA passbook or bankbook is a paper book used to record bank transactions on a deposit account. Depending on the country or the financial institution, it can be of the dimensions of a chequebook or a passport....
printers, cash dispensers, magnetic stripe reader and pinpadPINpadA PIN pad is an electronic device used in a debit or smart card-based transaction to input and encrypt the cardholder's PIN. PIN pads are normally used with integrated point of sale devices in which an electronic cash register is responsible for taking the sale amount and initiating/handling the...
. - It contained SNA LU emulations for mainframeMainframe computerMainframes are powerful computers used primarily by corporate and governmental organizations for critical applications, bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing.The term originally referred to the...
connectivity. - Peripheral device configuration was fixed during boot time. Configuration changes were made using the
SYSGENcommand. - It supported a "flat" file systemFile systemA file system is a means to organize data expected to be retained after a program terminates by providing procedures to store, retrieve and update data, as well as manage the available space on the device which contain it. A file system organizes data in an efficient manner and is tuned to the...
; there were no subdirectories. File name format was like this:diskname:usernumber.catalogname.filename.ext;version - Files had various types, like text files and index sequential data filesISAMISAM stands for Indexed Sequential Access Method, a method for indexing data for fast retrieval. ISAM was originally developed by IBM for mainframe computers...
. - Main programming languageProgramming languageA programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....
was WhitesmithsWhitesmithsWhitesmiths Ltd. was a software company based in Westford, Massachusetts. It sold a Unix-like operating system called Idris, as well as the first commercial C compiler...
CC (programming language)C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
, but the compilerCompilerA compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a programming language into another computer language...
was not ANSI CANSI CANSI C refers to the family of successive standards published by the American National Standards Institute for the C programming language. Software developers writing in C are encouraged to conform to the standards, as doing so aids portability between compilers.-History and outlook:The first...
compliant. - It had limited memory (several MBMegabyteThe megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage or transmission with two different values depending on context: bytes generally for computer memory; and one million bytes generally for computer storage. The IEEE Standards Board has decided that "Mega will mean 1 000...
) and disk (several hundred MB).
NCR Tower 5000 systems were also capable of running UNIX
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
SVR3 version.