Last night on WHYY, I watched most of a documentary about the WWII codebreakers at NCR in Dayton. This morning, I found this web site dedicated to the story.

I don't remember hearing of this story when I worked at NCR just south of Dayton in Miamisburg in the early 90's.

Maybe if I had spent more time downtown, the company's history would have been communicated to me more fully. The corporate culture in the Miamisburg office was fairly weak, too many young people, not enough oldtimers (a striking difference when I joined AT&T: lots of oldtimers entrenched in their culture).

And I wasn't in R&D or technology, my group supported the US sales team, so I had no contact with professional "descendents" of Joe Desch in engineering.

I guess UD owns NCR's former building 26. I haven't any clue what's become of the company since I left, so I was surprised to learn that NCR abandoned building 26 to the school.