According to data from the Great Britain History Project, run by Portsmouth University, manufacturing accounted for about 40% of jobs in the city as recently as the mid-1970s.

The signs of the rapid decline since are still visible. Take a drive along the Kingsway in Dundee. It is like looking back in time to witness the demise of a once-proud industry.

Names such as ABB, Valentines and Timex come to mind. Factories that once employed hundreds, even thousands are now demolished, derelict or a shadow of their former selves, although some have found profitable new uses.

The list of companies that failed or downsized goes on — Merrimate, Dundee Textiles, Tay Spinners, Levi Strauss, TDI Batteries, Holo Krome, Simclar, Ferranti, Farmor Engineering.

In the past decade alone, the number of jobs in manufacturing has fallen by a third to about 9000 and yesterday’s bitter blow from NCR will reduce that still further.

The sector now employees fewer people than wholesale/retail, health & social work and public administration & social security.

In fact, only two traditional manufacturers — NCR and tyre-makers Michelin — make it into the current top 10 employers and even they can do no better than sixth and 10th spot respectively.

Even Michelin has cut its workforce recently and management have emphasised the need to stay competitive in a difficult market.

NHS Tayside has the greatest number of employees, followed by the city council and Dundee University. The company with the biggest workforce is Tesco, but it will cut more than 400 jobs this summer when it closes its distribution depot.

The vast majority of the 250 or so businesses left in the manufacturing sector are small to medium-sized and there are no big players ready and eager to take on the 650 workers NCR are showing the door.

But Dundee is no stranger to this kind of blow. The city grew hugely during the 19th Century off the back of the rapidly growing textiles industry, with tens of thousands employed in the mills or supplying them.

Those mills are long gone now, many knocked down or turned into flats, and the jobs went with them.

Shipbuilding was also once a major employer too, with yards all along the estuary. But names such as Robb Caledon and Kestrel Marine are now no more than history.

Dundee has worked hard to reinvent itself in recent years to counteract the apparently unstoppable decline in manufacturing.

It has promoted itself as a retail centre, with the success of the redeveloped Overgate and its plans for expansion testament to the hard work that has gone into attracting shoppers from throughout the region.

The two retail parks on Kingsway, both anchored by major supermarkets, have also proved popular and leisure developments have done well too.

Overall, the service sector now accounts for vast majority of employment, with a recent survey showing that call centres are playing an important role.

However, it is worth noting that although there are reckoned to be 84,000 jobs based in Dundee, only about 64,000 of the city’s working-age population are classed as economically active.

You have only to watch the rush-hour traffic to understand how many people who live outside the city come to work here.

Another strand in the attempts to regenerate Dundee is in spin-offs from the world-class work being done in the universities and at Ninewells Hospital.

The biotechnology and computer/new media industries have offered the best opportunities for industrial growth, although most of the companies in the sector remain relatively small and need skills that ex-factory workers do not possess.

But even these exciting new industries are not guaranteed to succeed, with names such as Vis Entertainment and Pro2Kem coming and going in the past few years.

The bottom line is that unemployment in Dundee remains above the Scottish and UK averages and the chances of a big manufacturer coming in to offer hundreds of jobs are vanishingly small given the ever-growing competition from low-cost economies in eastern Europe and Asia.

But nobody owes Dundee a living. It will be up to bodies such as the city council and Scottish Enterprise Tayside to do what they can to encourage new business, but it will also be up to its people to ensure they have the skills and enthusiasm employers need.