Singer Business Machines, Inc.

Singer Business Machines, was a subsidiary of Singer Company, manufacturer of electronic calculators, copying machines, and other office products.

In 1976, Singer Corporation decided to dispose of its subsidiary, Singer Business Machines, Inc.

Singer Business Machines (SBM) was originally formed to support Singer Corp.’s retail operations. It became an amalgam of acquisitions, including Friden and Cogar Corporation, and took on an international life of its own, presided over by George Cogar, father of Univac 1004, Singer 1500 and the XS3 character code which they shared. SBM also developed ranges of factory data collection and retail point-of-sale (POS) terminals, clustered on System Tens or 1500s, and challenged IBM and NCR for dominance of the POS market, with some awesome sales, involving many thousands of terminals each, to stores chains like Sears Roebuck and J.C. Penney. By 1976, however, the contractual reliability obligations with major retail customers in the USA had become very onerous, and Singer decided to resolve them by disposing of SBM.