The document discusses the history of bedside terminals in hospitals. It describes how in 1982, NCR pioneered portable bedside terminals called PNUTs that allowed nurses to record patient vital signs directly at the bedside using a small portable device. The PNUT had a small keyboard and offered improvements over prior practices of nurses handwriting notes. However, the PNUT did not sell widely, facing challenges of limited hospital budgets and FDA approval processes. The document also provides background on NCR's history and innovation in developing early office equipment.

1. “H.I.S.-tory” by
Vince Ciotti
© 2011 H.I.S. Professionals, LLC, all rights reserved
Episode # 42:
Bedside
Terminals

2. Bedside Terminal Revolution
• You may remember from an earlier HIStory episode how daring it
was when Mike Mulhall (of later fame as SMS’ VP of IDs) dared to
place a 1052 terminal on the nurse stations at Monmouth Hospital
in NJ back in 1968 as part of IBM’s pioneering “HIS” project there.
• In the event, the “Selectric” style keyboard was so cumbersome to
RNs and even Ward Clerks (no “Unit Secretaries” back then) that
Mike ended up putting them in the basement where “Kelly Girls”
typed in orders phoned down from the floors (earliest “scribes!”).
• Well, we are now going to see how it
was not about 15 years later when
microprocessors of the early 80s
allowed devices to penetrate that
most hollowed sanctum of hospitals:
patient rooms themselves, soon to
be known as “Bedside Terminals.”

3. The Bedside Pioneer
• And just who was the early DP vendor who pioneered this move
of terminals down the hall from nurse stations to patient rooms?
• I’ll give you some hints (and I’ll bet many of you get it wrong!):
– Starting in the 1880s, this firm was one of the first to establish a formal
“inventions department” – in essence, the first R&D in office equipment.
– The founder and CEO was a sales maven, who literally wrote the book in
sales training, sales quotas, commission plans and marketing strategies.
– The firm introduced classy brochures that described products in glowing
terms with skillful descriptions and profusely illustrated graphics.
– By 1928, this pioneering company posted $50M in annual revenue, making
it one of the top 4 leading firms in early office machinery suppliers.
• One of its early sales superstars was Tom
Watson, who cut his teeth selling pianos to
famers in upstate NY in the late 1800s.
• Only natural this office gear pioneer would
be the first to build a bedside terminal, so
• Who was this pioneering firm??Who was this pioneering firm??

4. NOT IBM!!!!!!!!
• Gotcha, huh? It was the National
Cash Register Company – NCR!
• Tom Watson Sr. started with them
as a sales rep and learned his skills
from NCR’s founder, John Patterson,
who started NCR way back in 1884.
• By 1908, Watson was promoted to
sales manager at NCR, but in 1911,
Patterson fired him (sound like any
arrogant vendor CEO you know?).
• Watson left and took his amazing
sales skills to C-T-R, the firm who
inherited the Hollerith punched card
system, which later morphed into
IBM. Meanwhile, back to bedside
terminals, and NCR’s breakthrough:

5. No “Peanut”!!
• Around 1982, NCR launched an
amazing project to build a device
that RNs could hand-carry right into
a patient’s room to record vital signs
– Temperature, Pulse & Respiration (TPR)
• They called this breakthrough device
the “PNUT” for Portable Nursing
Unit Terminal, and was it ever hot!
• Pictured on the right is a 30-year old
brochure I saved from the 80s, on
which I wrote the name & phone #
of NCR’s PNUT Product Manager:
– Wayne Roach – are you out there
Wayne? Gimmee a call or email!!
• An early developer of the PNUT was:

6. PNUT Developer
• (Just amazing what you can find on the
Internet these days…)
• Pictured on the left is Bob Reminick,
Project Engineer at NCR from 1982 –
1984, responsible for the Electrical
Systems and Software design and test
for the PNUT and its "Cradle" (docking
station). Are you out there, Bob?
• Like everyone else in the HIS industry back the 80s, I was fascinated
by the ads for the PNUT that ran in Modern Healthcare, HMFA, etc.
• What an amazing jump from desktop PCs and floppy disks!
• The device offered an enormous improvement over the then-
current practice of RNs scribbling patient’s vital signs on scraps of
paper, their scrubs, or even the back of their hands, and then
carrying the info back to the nurse station where it was copied
onto TPR logs in the chart, with the inevitable transcription errors…

7. PNUT’s Keyboard
• Pictured on the right is the PNUT’s
diminutive keyboard through which
nurses keyed in the patients names,
room number, etc. (no bar coding)
• Doesn’t this look like an inspiration
for the Blackberry, iPhone, and
scores of other modern PDAs!?
• Sadly, the PNUT did not sell well,
despite gazillions of leads from
techno-horny “DONs” (Director of
Nursing – no “CNOs” back then!).
• They had little budget to buy high-
tech IT gizmos, and since it touched
patients, NCR had the usual
challenging time with the FDA…

8. Want to learn more…
• About this amazing bedside pioneer? Then chase down this FDA
website and read on…
• (Makes you wonder how in the world did they ever write history
books back before the age of Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Bling…)
• In the next episode on bedside terminal systems, we’ll cover one
whose founder walked into Sheldon Dorenfests’ office in 1985
where we helped him found a firm that lives on to this day…