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In doing some research I found the following article and thought I'd share it. The "state-of-the-art" computer system they're referring to is the Printrak Model 50. It had a black & white screen, roller ball for a mouse, and a dot matrix printer! I remember it well as it was still in the office when I was transferred here in 1995.

Originally published on Wednesday, May 02, 1990 in the Local & State category.

OFFICERS GET NEW FINGERPRINT SYSTEM
Wednesday, May 2, 1990
By MIKE BARRETT Of The Times Staff
A "state-of-the-art" computer system that compares fingerprints and should help solve more crimes in Cumberland County has been installed at the Law Enforcement Center, authorities said Tuesday.
The more than $150,000 system was installed at the City County Identification Bureau, authorities said.
"It's going to be a real plus for all law enforcement agencies and will help catch criminals," Sheriff Morris Bedsole said.
Fayetteville Police Chief Ron Hansen said, "We are very fortunate to have a state-of-the-art fingerprint computer, and we are confident that it will result in many more crime cases being solved."
The system compares fingerprints from Cumberland County crime scenes with fingerprints of people with criminal records, authorities said.
Previously, crime scene technicians compared fingerprints by hand, a search that could take years unless authorities had a suspect, authorities said.
The new computer system allows a fingerprint from a crime scene to be compared with all fingerprints in the county computer system in minutes, authorities said. If there is no match, then the fingerprint can be compared to the 300,000 prints in the Automated Fingerprint Information System computer bank operated by the State Bureau of Investigation in Raleigh and Garner.
Cumberland County is the fifth law enforcement agency in the state to install a computer fingerprint matching system. The others are the Gastonia Police Department, Gaston County Sheriff's Department, City County Identification Bureau in Raleigh and the SBI, authorities said.
In 1987, the SBI installed its $2.6 million system that includes five computers and began entering the fingerprints, according to Larry Wilkie, the SBI computer systems manager.
About 300 sets of fingerprints are entered daily into the SBI central computer system as they are received from sheriff's and police departments in the state's 100 counties, Mr. Wilkie said.
Since Gastonia installed its computer system last year, the police have matched 75 sets of prints and cleared 140 crime cases, Police Capt. Jim Deaton said.
In Raleigh, Charles Dunn, the deputy director of the SBI, said, "It's one of the best things to happen to law enforcement in North Carolina in the past decade. Even if we have no suspects, we can run (prints) through the system."
"We are making cases regularly, especially in property crimes," he said. "We will be solving some old cases

That would have been a Printrak System 300 using a model 50 Latent terminal

Not sure if this is you in the photo Angie, but it should be a similar system

Bill, what picture?

And the State of the art in 1990

Printrak Orion

Notice the side by side comparisons that were possible

Images were stored on 12 inch optical discs and accessed by a "monster" called a library handler

And today all that data storage and processing power would fit on an iPhone, with plenty of room to spare.

David Fairhurst wrote:And today all that data storage and processing power would fit on an iPhone, with plenty of room to spare.

That reminds me of our old NEC system of the same era. It filled up a large room and had two rows of large disk drives that we referred to as "washing machines." I once asked our CE how much storage was on each disk drive and added it all up--it came to about 13GB, which was huge back in 1988 when the system was installed. Now 13GB sounds like nothing.

Alan C wrote:

David Fairhurst wrote:And today all that data storage and processing power would fit on an iPhone, with plenty of room to spare.

That reminds me of our old NEC system of the same era. It filled up a large room and had two rows of large disk drives that we referred to as "washing machines." I once asked our CE how much storage was on each disk drive and added it all up--it came to about 13GB, which was huge back in 1988 when the system was installed. Now 13GB sounds like nothing.

My first home PC was purchased in 1993 (a 486 DX). I upgraded to get the larger hard drive... 340MB. The price for the computer was only around $2000. I received a copy of MS Office Pro as a gift. There were over 20 1.44 floppy disks to do the complete install.

Steve Everist wrote:My first home PC was purchased in 1993 (a 486 DX). I upgraded to get the larger hard drive... 340MB. The price for the computer was only around $2000. I received a copy of MS Office Pro as a gift. There were over 20 1.44 floppy disks to do the complete install.

Darned kids. Why, back when I was a whipper-snapper, we learned to do simple functions in our heads and used yellow #2 pencils and Big Chief tablets for the hard stuff. I remember when the most sophisticated piece of computational hardware was a slide rule. At university, you carried your slide rule in a leather holster on your belt, the same place you hook your iPhone today.

You kids don't know how easy you've got it.

Tazman wrote:Darned kids. Why, back when I was a whipper-snapper, we learned to do simple functions in our heads and used yellow #2 pencils and Big Chief tablets for the hard stuff. I remember when the most sophisticated piece of computational hardware was a slide rule. At university, you carried your slide rule in a leather holster on your belt, the same place you hook your iPhone today.

You kids don't know how easy you've got it.

I remember my great grandfather talking about having to math uphill both ways (or something like that) - I didn't realize there was someone around old enough to verify it!

And nobody wears their phone on their belt anymore - that's so 2000.

Steve,

When I was a younger kid, our TV went out and my parents came to us kids and asked if we'd rather have a TV or a new-fangled computer. We all wanted a TV but throught the computer thing was cool so we opted for it. Our first PC was an IBM with 640K of memory (I don't even know what size the hard drive was) running some linux-esque based OS. I remember our word processing software was called LEWP (Leading Edge Word Processing). We could go to the Omaha Public Library and get free games on 5-1/4" floppy disks. To shut the computer off, you had to 'park' it; I guess that meant moving the read head on the drive to a location where no data was stored so if you jarred it, you would still be able to start it up again. At school, I remember working in BASIC programming on an Apple II gs where we could acutally see color on the screen. I think there was a 9-hole golf game called the Buick Classic we played in study hall; that and Oregon Trail. I worked my butt off one summer and bought a Quantex 486 DX2 right about the same time Pentium computers were coming out but so many were having the chip issues that I stuck with the 486. I spent many long nights playing Wolfenstein 3D and Duke Nukem. I remember downloading a movie trailer for Waterworld that took all night; when I watched it the next morning, it was about 120 px x 120px in size and 30 seconds long. I also remember that my uncle was setting up an AOL account for me and was going to make my username 'Studmuffin'; thank God it was already taken. It's great how computer nerds like myself remember their first computer like most people remember their first car.

Josh

josher89 wrote:Steve,

... It's great how computer nerds like myself remember their first computer like most people remember their first car.

Josh

I remember both (although my first computer was a Commodore 64 (which I still have and works) all too well.

The NEC system Alan referenced was in a special room, with raised flooring and its own AC system. It had to be checked routinely to keep it from getting too hot and having to shut down the system. The terminals we used were also in this area - grab a sweater and go enter some prints!

Steve
The predecessor to the commodore 64 was a VIC 20. I won't admit how I know that

The reference to "washing machine Disc Drives" forces me to produce another historical picture. It also shows the raised floor and the A/C unit that kept the room cooled like a refrigerator

I've got you all beat. What did I do in my 1984 summer after 6th grade you ask (and you did). Programmed robots, played Hunt the Wumpus and hacked TRS80's among other computers, all while roasting marshmallows, swimming in a lake and playing capture the flag in knee high tube socks.

Boyd

That is WAY more information than I wanted

*cough* Sour grapes *cough*