Background: Following the acquisition of MRC by Westinghouse Learning Corporation (WLC) in June 1968, there was an increased emphasis on marketing the MRC product line of Optical Mark Reader (OMR) scanners developed in Iowa City, and a limited number of high-cost systems had been sold in 1968-76, both domestically and in Europe and Asia, such as the RASCOL/W301's, W201's, and W600B models ("high-cost": e. g., costing in the $100K + range up to several hundred thousand dollars). Our archrival in the emerging WLC OMR scanner hardware sales at this time was National Computer Systems (NCS) located in the Minneapolis, MN area, with regional sales offices distributed so as to cover the entire United States. We at WLC sincerely believed that our OMR products were superior in speed, accuracy, and maintainability, based upon research data from many sources. In fact, we won several major 'shootouts' against NCS based upon the customers' favorable viewpoint of these critical factors, but the presumed higher-cost was perceived by others as a disadvantage for WLC. Accordingly, Chet Sadlow, WLC President in 1977, ordered the MRC General Manager, Burdette P. Hansen, to prepare a comprehensive analysis of our competitive position vis-a-vis NCS. Burdette assigned this task to me, and I released my findings on 21 June 1977, which Burdette forwarded to Sadlow at his office in NYC. As a humorous aside, I should mention - with due discretion - that Chet was a short, stout individual who always had his jet-black hair slicked back with lots of 'greasy kid stuff', and his suit's pant-legs always seemed about 3" too short. He was also very short on 'small talk' or compliments to the staff, as I remember him, but during one of his too frequent visits to MRC we both happened to be using the bathroom urinals at the same time, standing side by side, and he said "Good job, Mac, on the Competitive Analysis you've just finished, but we've got to learn a lot more before we make any decisions about expanding our OMR hardware line", or words to that effect. To this day, I don't know whether his bathroom remarks were a compliment or an insult?