Actually McDonald's uses fully fledged PCs for each screen which network boot a version of Windows Embedded off of a server. Then after booting it runs their KVS software on top. It just hasn't changed because it is simple and easier to learn.
Former McDonald's manager here. You should see the way they have those restaurants set up. At one point, my store was using devices running Windows XP Embedded (the POS), Linux (the KVS), and Unix (the Back Office Server). The fact they were able to get all this software running together in tandem across these different OS's absolutely blew my mind. Then, when we upgraded our systems, the POS (point of sale, the registers) were running Windows 7 Embedded, and we no longer use the Unix interface in the back office servers, but still amazes me how flawlessly they can get all these different systems running. It's all rather amazing, until you have an issue.
Why is that so amazing? Computers running every operating system in existence (some you've never even heard of) all exchange information using the internet all the time. As long as the interfaces and protocols are well defined, there's no issues exchanging data between different systems. You're just used to software written by incompetent people, or people that didn't care if it worked correctly or not.
@@JoePro Your router probably runs Linux on an MIPS or ARM architecture, yet your x64 architecture Windows computer communicates with it flawlessly -- and you probably set it all up!
@@JoePro They indeed do. In fact the router is mostly what the computer communicates with, because beyond the local NAT, it's a whole different network.
In 2077 there will be no staff to push buttons, Except for the upscale places that has real people servicing you. A robot makes the fries already at McDonalds and the customers punches in their orders. Robot pizza- and noodle places are somewhat common in Japan. The single highest cost in a restaurant is wages, so there is tremendous pressure to automate that sector.
The Motorola 68000 is like 40+ years old and it's modern counterparts are also still being used in many modern applications to this day, including radiation hardened versions used on spacecraft
I have and did a video about an MSTI PDX-1000 thin client, which uses the Vortex86DX chip running at 1 GHz. It's also based on a 586/Pentium-class CPU but the DX version lacks MMX. It came with a lightweight version of Linux, but can run any OS within the limits of its hardware capabilities, including DOS and Windows XP.
@@charlesmckee4719 They are franchises. The licensing companies might have a lot of control over what foods are prepared and how, but a lot of things are variable and depend on the owner, who may own just one or several franchise stores. I don't know if you've ever seen one of these chains in another country, or even different parts of your country, but equipment, computers, microwaves, anything that is not related to cooking signature food in very particular ways, might be different, although it might often be the same if they get the equipment at franchise discounts. Yakov Smirnoff would joke "In Russia, McDonalds serves beer. When I first went to a McDonalds in America, I tried to order beer and people around me laughed "We don't have beer at McDonald's here!" I felt dumb and embarrassed, but then I thought, "No beer? but that means all these fools are here for the food!" I laughed and felt better.
@@ThisDoesNotCompute I was waiting you to try a bootable DOS SD card or FAT USB drive tbh :D Cool little thing! if someone could make a board with Soundblaster compatible sound and something like voodoo 1 compatible graphics it would be just perfect for DOS! And maybe a pre-configured/configurable boot menu to automatically adjust the clock speeds/disable cache/adjust available memory at startup, so you can go from an 8088/286/386/486 up to the Pentium MMX days depending on the DOS era games you want to experience, that would be the *perfect* retro DOS platform
I used to work in POS support- these were typically called a "Bump Bar." edit: This is a really advanced bump bar compared to what we supported a decade ago. And it supports external bump bars in addition to its own buttons!
I can't speak for all but Burger King still uses dumb bump bars which are basically just buttons and an encoder sending pulses to the central box over RJ11. The difference being in recent years the central "Kitchen Minder" systems have been getting replaced with a touch screen Linux based computer from SICOM called the "Chef".
I _currently_ work in POS support and I support for a couple of different national chains that use this exact device. They do still call it a "Bump Bar". They use it for the simplified installation over the more common solution of a separate thin client and dumb keypad.
Worked at McD's and can tell you these things took a beating. Had one that was sluggish to work until the kitchen warmed up and I guess the bad solder made contact lol
I used to work in a commercial kitchen and I may have an explanation for why we use systems like these: It just works. While the Front Of House is going from table to table to receive, input, and deliver orders and the Back of House is prepping, preparing, and cooking the food the last thing you want is for a complex backbone of your system to stop working. A failure in these devices increases time for both parts of the system to effectively communicate with each other. A key idea to keep in mind is "the more moving parts something has, the more likely something is going to go wrong". If a complex machine that is integral to your system goes down are you going to be able to fix it? Do you need someone to specialize in fixing it? If the answer is yes, do you have the money to employ or contract people to fix it? How much time will it take for them to respond? A commercial kitchen is a faced paced environment. Stress levels are high and the last thing you want is to add more for your cooks/servers. These devices are so simple that anyone can use it. Adding a layer of complexity, no matter how small, impairs the entire team. It stays because it works; proven over time.
I used to work with these. The worst problem was the dc jack coming off the board. That and the membrane keypad breaking up. Both of which were relatively easy to fix. I think the chip was 386 based and was plenty powerful enough for this application.
Obligatory “the iPad at home” joke And man I feel you on that harness around the AC jack. One of the reasons I taught myself to solder was on account of the fact that I got so tired buying new CD players (this was the 90s still, so not cheap) when I’d inevitably break the headphone jack. Always hated how flimsy they were.
Yeah. it's a great Idea, and I'm glad they made an effort, but sadly it's not terribly effective. I do Tech support for a couple of national chains that use this exact device. The top 2 failure modes for this device are 1 - membrane keypad wearing out, and 2 - Damaged DC power jack.
@@monad_tcp Some laptops no longer have the jack soldered directly to the board but rather connect to a cable instead. After replace too many jacks I was happy to see that.
Were you inserting the headphone jack at ramming speed? I've been pretty rough with mine, but the only time I managed to move the jack out of place is by dropping the CD player on a plugged in jack. Were you buying cheap KOSS or RCA CD players?
As far as it being drop tested, it's usually placed under a small monitor above the french fry station and the spot where finished orders are placed. There could be an earthquake, there could be a fire, someone might just be mad that they accidently received extra onions and then decide to take it out on the kitchen gadgets. Anything is possible.
Having recognized the display font, I always assumed those displays were connected to literal PCs running DOS or something unix-esque, so the idea that it's got a pentium in it isn't any kind of shock at all.
4:15 The first generations probably failed from a broken-off DC jack, so they reinforced it. And VGA, RS232 and RS485 are still super-common with kitchens, like printers.
Same with retail. PC companies adopted USB, in part to get users to buy more things. If tech doesn't have a special advantage, it doesn't get updated. There's lots of 386 and 486 single board computers still sold for industrial equipment, with all the old ports. The problem is that they are mostly made and sold in bulk. If you try to buy a single one for DOS gaming, it will be nearly as much as a new PC.
@@squirlmy That's a bit undifferentiated. USB has a lot of advantages for a computer used in a desktop environment, as does HDMI over VGA. USB consolidated a lot of different connection types into a single standard, and overall reduces cost while giving better performance. It's just that for PoS, no one cares about performance, it just doesn't give any meaningful advantage there, and keeping the old standard means that it will be backwards compatible with older equipment.
@@graealex It's not so much that they don't care about those advantages, it's that they care even more about stability. That stuff has to work, day in and day out. So any bit of complexity that can be avoided is avoided. Remember that Microsoft USB demo (or was it PnP?) that demo'ed their bluescreen instead? And the USB-keyboard-during-boot issues? Even on my "not that old" PC the USB-keyboard works in the BIOS and in Windows, but not on the Windows "how do you want to boot after that crash?" screen.
@@HenryLoenwind That's a nice sentiment, but the truth is that RS232 is too slow for most desktop applications, including a simple color printer. Upper limit is 1 Mbit/s, that's fine for a text-only ticket, but not for full-page raster images.
This is very interesting. I work part-time in a kitchen and we have a similar system. I'd never given much thought to how the system works until I was working late one night and at 12:30am the whole system does a daily reboot, and as it was coming back online I saw it run through the process of initializing all the kitchen screens before I caught a glimpse of "starting MS DOS". It's pretty crazy how these ancient systems are still relied upon in so many applications, but sometimes you really do just need a simple, barebones system that is bulletproof and will just work no matter the circumstances. I remember one day we had a power cut for about an hour, and just before it happened I had some tickets on the screen. When the power came back, after a couple of beeps the system came right back and all the tickets were still there waiting, it even kept track of the time they were on!
Be carful when working with old brittle plastic, guys. Just put a small screwdriver thru my middle finger last week when trying to fix an old digital thermometer. I was holding it in my left hand when trying to undo the inner screws to the motherboard when the whole thing just broke into pieces in my hand and I jammed the screwdriver thru my finger. Thankfully it didn’t hit anything vital so it’s pretty much healed right now, but it was definitely one of the freakiest accidents I’ve been involved in.
Lesson learned. Never screw or unscrew anything in your hand, on your lap or other bodyparts. Use table or something. :) glad that you didn't stab yourself any worse than that. My dad stabbed himself right in the thigh back in the day. Could've been fatal.
Had it happen a few times to me, luckily didn't break the skin, but hurt like hell. Had an AC adapter (not DC)'s case crumble when I was unplugging it (HOLY FUCKBALLS!), so I shut off the powerbar and waited 30 seconds before unplugging it. I wouldn't be here still if I didn't take prompt action. :o
I was cutting a D sized battery in half to get the graphite rod. I had the battery in a vice. The hack saw slipped and it hit my thumb. If you hold your thumb upwards, it cut my thumb vertically. It cut 2 mm of nail. There wasn't much bleeding but it hurt a lot. I put electrical tape on my thumb so that the fingernail doesn't get caught on cloths fibers or while I'm sleeping, get caught in the bed fibers. Remember, if the ladies don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy.
In the year 2000 I worked for a small Point-of-Sale manufacturer. They had a lot of devices that used off-brand 386 CPUs and ran MS-DOS. I thought those were outdated back then. Crazy to see stuff like this still being produced in 2021. Thanks for the video!
I don't think power consumption is a big design concern when there's one 64 Mb (mega bits, not bytes) ram chip, and it's plugged into the wall for power anyway.
The touchscreen feature is so that you can bump orders directly pressing the display. Where I work this is done with thin clients hooked to touchscreens, and there's a physical "dumb" bump bar keypad just in case the touchscreen functionality fails at some busy moment, so you don't have to forcibly restart the windows powered thin client to reload the touch drivers.
I really like just how bespoke they've made this device, it's a true "Purpose Built" machine rather than something generic being loosely repurposed for a given task, as happens so often these days. A current product but a design philosophy from the good old days. Thank you for sharing!
agreed - the POS systems are often unreliable because they are build on embedded Windows. The displays in the kitchens, running this basically never break. I had one of these when I worked in Wetherspoon, and without it we would have drowned in orders. Its super reliable, has multiple monitors for the different stations, and even a different display for when you "bump" the order to the serving staff.
@@chootastic Windows is, honestly, rarely the problem. POS vendors (and their spec customers) just put the most insane software stacks _on top of_ Windows. One of the worst I ever had to support was POSReady 2009 running a real-time Java x86 emulator to boot Linux, which then had a Java _remote desktop_ client to access an Windows desktop running virtualized on the office server - which were generally quad-core, fixed-clock Xeons - locked down to IE (for inventory lookup, as an ActiveX applet) and _another_ Java emulator to run OS/2 (!?) for the actual POS software. And they couldn't understand why even late-generation, desktop Core i7 systems were still dog-slow . . ..
@@alexdhall IDK if you knew already, but the Space Shuttle was still using 8086 chips even as Pentiums were coming out, because they were less resistant to cosmic radiation. They couldn't just upgrade, they had to build things like lead-lined enclosures for circuitry finer than the 8086's 3 microns (3000 nanometers. Typical ARM chips now are 7 nanometers) RAM is also sensitive to SEUs (Single event Upsets), and Single Event Effects.
In the early 2000's I was working at a Steel mill where the Process Control unit (similar to a PLC) was based on a custom board running a Intel Pentium 2 chip and a real-time Unix OS ( we had to run 4 to control one rolling mill). Around 2012 we wanted to upgrade and the latest product was based on a Pentium 3 , which was out of production for 5 years already! They booted off a compact flash card that couldn't be bigger than 8MB... oh the good old days.
I enjoyed that even in the mid '00s, bowling alleys near me still used computers for the score display that were very obviously outputting CGA. Two palettes it would cycle between- green/brown/red, or white/magenta/cyan.
The bowling alley near me was still using a 1950s optical system until they closed in the 2000s. Other than the cash register and maybe some cameras I doubt there were any semiconductors in the building.
@@bangerbangerbro They are now - they changed it all in 2019 or so, then Covid happened. Not sure if they're open. Those EGA screens were in there since the mid 90s lol.
I think a lot of products like this exist because the source code is long gone for some binary library and they have to continue maintaining x86 compatability with it.
Yep, we had these when I worked at Pizza Hut. They were not permanently mounted though, they sat on top of the make stations with their monitors so you could press the buttons. They did constantly fall off and we did have to restart them often because they crashed all the time. Never knew it was a Pentium inside, I'd considered buying one for the novelty until I saw the prices. Ours only had 2 buttons: green and red. EDIT: You actually showed this, neat VGA is used because in a lot of these industrial settings it's still very common to see them. Obviously this isn't a performance gaming machine and let's be honest you'll never see it do much of anything impressive on that display, so using the more expensive connector and forcing thousands of upgrades to more modern monitors is not in their interest.
You can easily get a VGA adapter anyways if you wanted to run it on newer screens. This way the customer doesn't have to upgrade all their screens. I don't think it'd be easy to run an old CRT VGA monitor off of a DP port, but I could be wrong.
So glad to see this as I have always wondered what the kitchen monitors used in fast food restaraunts looked like they were running some sort of DOS compatible hardware
I remember reading about the Rise mp6 CPU back in the late 90's. I remember reading a review about one online and it was slower than the Winchip. No wonder why it didn't last long. But it's fascinating to see old technology still being used today.
Its crazy where you find older CPU's and other components. They use truly ancient chips in things like the Mars rovers because they've been around so long and pretty much any issues there could be with them have been seen and fixed/worked around over the years. They used some old POWER3 or 4 chips (can't recall off the top of my head) for Curiosity that had massive radiation shielding added. Their more simple architecture also means they're less likely to fail or get messed up. Bit flipping is a thing with cosmic rays, so they're hardened against that by virtue of simply pushing fewer bits (on top of other things).
@@TalesOfWar Agreed. In space design there are approved parts lists where each item has gone through rigorous testing, analysis, hardening, etc. Not limited to CPUs or even active components. The expense to add items to the list is obviously higher for active components, and higher still for complex ones. In the end, it's the simple matter that you can't exactly service them after the fact. Cost of adding items to the list VS cost of servicing in case of failure in space VS cost to use already approved parts.
@@TalesOfWar They used the BAE RAD5500. BAE Systems is basically the only company that produces radiation hardened CPUs. They're all PowerPC offshoots for some reason.
Here 3 years in the future. Rasteri and Eivind have built several Retro DOS PCs around this SoM. * WeeCee * Tiny Llama (1, 2) * ITX Llama I'm glad you covered this.
@@CTMKD Currently... PS/2 is still a much better interface for keyboards than USB (at least assuming that you don't bother with hotswapping), but USB is a much better interface when it comes to mice. Yeah, PS/2 keyboards have lower latency than USB keyboards. They also don't rely as heavily on drivers, and often have true n-key rollover. PS/2 mice on the other hand... The way that mice actually work is just far better suited to USB instead. I'm glad nobody uses PS/2 mice anymore.
Yup, I remember reading about that a while ago... PS2 uses hardware interrupts right? If so, it will always have far far less latency than USB... doesn't matter if it's USB 1.1 or Thunderbolt 7... anything that *polls* will always be higher latency than something that *interrupts* right?
Or because you are still using a special form factor keyboard with a non standard layout, like at a cash register. The electric parts supplier here uses some old DOS software for inventory and sales, and they still have a barcode scanner attached to the PS/2 keyboard cable with a splitter.
@@AmaroqStarwind what's wrong with PS/2 mice? I've written code for them, and it seems like a reasonable interface. It could use more bits of precision though.
National Semiconductor (Texas Instruments) had their own Pentium class embedded chip named the Geode. It was sold on and at one point became an AMD product. That product line also included a slightly different Cyrix CPU design, differentiated by a few letters at the end. There's a Wikipedia article for the series, though I have only used the original design in a Soekris displayless board.
I'm sure this product has been re-engineered multiple times over the years as well. You can see they have two footprints for the flash memory, that's a part that very commonly goes obsolete and needs replacement. Another interesting thing I wonder how they implemented is the MTBF counter. I wonder how they read that back? It's got a connector for the JTAG so maybe over that. Anyway I work with embedded devices and it's always interesting to see how other people do it. My company here in the Twin Cities has made a ton of Windows CE products and, while they're in very different applications to this, much of it is the same.
The drop test was probably done as a "sure why not" because it usually comes as a packaged deal with *vibration* tests which I'm sure you can imagine are much more applicable to a product like this. Nearly every commercial electronics product undergoes *packaged* shock/vibe/drop tests to get their ISTA 3A and/or FedEx certification--if your product and packaging pass those tests then shipping carriers are more likely to take responsibility for damage. Unpackaged/bare unit tests tend to be more for higher end stuff or just up to the company designing it.
Bars and restaurants usually have a touchscreen POS system. They have a lot of items. That's how Starbucks was setup back when I worked there 10+ years ago.
They do now. But there are still a lot of these types of systems out there. (BK, McD's, etc.) I can remember working on the POS systems in a Panda Express and Chic-fil-a -- very "retro" touch screens that used rows of LEDs lining the edge of the screen. (and citrix terminals for auto parts stores. for the record, they still use the same AS400 backend, but the tn3270 program runs on the native windows PC terminal... parts inventory: web app, POS: tn3270.)
While a touchscreen setup makes sense for a POS (=point of sale), you'd rather want something like this HID with a simple display in a kitchen environment.
Supporting these at a call center was not less stressful. Not unheard of to get 60-80 calls a shift. All from pimply faced arrogant teenagers yelling at you that the system is down. I barely had time to close a ticket before the next call came in. You'd be surprised how often these things break on the national level (This was in Canada) - I wonder if there was a period of 5 minutes where all McD's restaurants in the nation were actually working properly. Job turnaround was high, but it paid really well for what it was so I stuck through it as long as I could to pay for college. IIRC I got fired from that place due to poor performance as a result of constant OT and burnout - I couldn't focus anymore. There were guys doing lines of coke in the bathroom and shit... not a great work environment. I smiled when they told me not to come in for my next shift. Thanked them and left. Put me through 2 years of school though :D
It has to conduct heat all the way to the case. Presumably whatever piece of stainless steel kitchen furniture it's screwed to acts as an additional heat sink.
I still have a couple - one of which I could still make use of as it's higher resolution than any of my flat screens (and I like 4:3 displays for certain stuff with computers).
Since the Vortex86 being used in commercial applications, specifically where money is being dealt with, I think it should get the following modifications: - Decimal floating point arithmetic. You don't want floating point errors screwing with your monetary transactions. -...actually, that's it.
I don't think that these are handling financial stuff at all, that would be done by the POS system that connects to a server that connects to one of these. These are just used for displaying the food orders.
@@AmaroqStarwind My point is that if you deal with the currency in the form of cents/mills, then you never have to handle it as a floating point value. It's a form of fixed-point math, which only uses integer arithmetic. Also x86 does have support for BCD arithmetic, although there's not really any point to it when you can just treat everything in terms of cents.
On a tangent, I hate how so many fast food places completely got rid of their fixed sign menus in favour of monitors. It's a real pain, if I'm ordering, to have to wait for the monitors to rotate through the screens to get back to my area of interest (usually chicken sandwiches) and show me all of the chicken sandwich options. I don't mind the presence of monitors to showcase things, especially the limited time menu items, but there should still be some fixed analogue menu signage.
@ This Does Not Compute I have fixed a lot of these over the last few years. The wire over the power jack does help, but it's not really enough, but there is another version of this, that you can not tell from this one without opening it up, that uses a full-length metal sleeve or the jack, and that one is better at protecting the power jack from being torqued. The issue with the second version is the sleeve and short out the power jack, and kill the board. The solder points for the metal loop wire or sleeve are not properly isolated from carrying current.
Oh my God the nightmares I've had from dealing with those LOL Nothing is quite as nasty as opening one of those up because it stopped working and to find that it was full of grease. If it helps the marketing information you show is correct, some of the older ones and I'm going back about 15 years did have 486 processors in them. They connect up to the Oasis controller which is the bigger blue box usually tucked up in the ceiling behind one of the monitors and that was controlled by a 386 SX. Just wanted to say thank you for bringing my nightmares back to life!
Back in 2005 or so I used to build systems (print servers, firewalls, 2u servers and such) at an OEM with factory new Intel P2 + P3 processors. When I built them I wondered where the F they got their inventory from.
It's a 486SX compatible DOS PC, there's a good chance you could just put Doom on the SD card and run it. You could even get sound effects with the PC speaker.
It's funny, I had something like this bar when I ran my pizza place in the early 2000's. I can't remember the company that made it, but like you said it was very turnkey for what it was. Amusing to think that the bar on my make line might've had as much computing power as the machine that ran our logistics. :) Thanks for the video and a look inside this little time capsule.
I've always wondered what was inside those things but never before remembered to look it up... Glad I'm a subscriber because you answered my at least 15 year old curiosity.
A lot of these have been swapped out for what are essentially smart tvs now, a thin client or similar low power arm hardware built in to the display handles it now. It's just cheaper overall.
Yeah, thankfully there are a few newer companies actually trying to push this technology forward - I’ve seen some even just build an iPad app instead of use boutique hardware.
@@ThisDoesNotCompute I've seen a lot of new restaurant management systems that use iPads everywhere, and that gets expensive fast. Especially once you start throwing in the accessories like armour cases so the staff don't destroy them (it'll still happen eventually, just might take longer), or the customers from stealing them... that happened to a couple clients of mine that didn't follow my advice to literally lock them down to the counter, but at least it lead to immediate new work contracts for security camera installations 😂
The software running might be written direct to the "metal" once upon a time (not even an MS-DOS application). Then it's just cheaper to find compatible components to keep it running.
That's fancier than any bump bar I've ever seen. The restaurants I've worked in usually have them connected to the KDS via separate network CPU that's then fed to a server in the office. Only input on the board is a proprietary connector that kinda looks like a Svideo input.
Side note, my old workplace used an AS400 based system for warehousing, inventory, POS.... everything. Amazingly fast, stable and simple. Once you got your menu numbers memorised that system was wicked fast. I'm glad they still use it. Sometimes stripping stuff back to bare bones truly is the way forward. A lot of airlines still use a CLI front end at checkin. Both major airlines I worked for had gumballed a lot of fancy GUI & customer interactivity elements onto the very very powerful CLI/database driven ticketing/reservations system. You could delete whole flights if you wanted. Hate to be responsible for security on that. Probably leaks like a sieve .
Is it a (north) American thing to have such old parts in these kind of devices? I used to develop similar stuff and here it's like all modern stuff. Mostly ARM these days. Most work on some kind of mysql database, all lcd with hdmi
I guess it breaks down to "don't fix what ain't broken": if you developed a working solution 15 years ago and can still sell it today, why invest in RnD for something new? Of course, if you're going to develop a solution today, you'll use what's available today. Including the obvious hardware overkill, software overhead, and myriad of ways it'll break/fail until you've got it all worked out.
Why would this thing need to access a DB? This is a display. There's a rack on site that's hosting the DB and serving info to the displays. The POS is going to be interfacing with the DB on the rack, this thing just needs to receive and display the info that is getting pushed from the rack.
@@poisonouslead85 Most companies I know of use a database for business analysis. That can be anything, but basically comes down to how to improve and streamline things. Also it's a lot easier to update products or workflows all at once, instead of programming each individual module. Even when that's done over a network. A lot of companies I know also would rather just buy a little PC or mini computer with an external controller. Much easier to upgrade when needed, much cheaper when the controller breaks down.
Please make more of these kinds of videos, I don't think I could work in a kitchen as it's too fast paste for me, so it's neat to learn about the tech they use there. You are right if it ain't brock don't fix it.
I worked at a place that used one of these. Ours may have been a little bit different because I believe there was also a thin client of some sort attached to it but it was pretty easy to work with. The tickets turn yellow when they’re aging and then red when they’ve passed the acceptable threshold set by the manager. Pretty slick actually
Very nicely made from the electronic engineering point of view. Thing of beauty, joy for ever. A learning opportunity here. I'd still put the DVI out on it, in case of new deployments - VGA inputs are increasingly harder to find on new gear, and the DVI has been around for two decades, so any user who had anything to do with computers will know what it's for.
Some new monitors still have a VGA input, though -- especially those meant for commercial or industrial settings. So I can see why they've stuck with it on at least one model.
What speed? I have machine 4x Pentium Pro 200,512 L2, 1gb ram, 2gb Max.. front panel touch screen for check few things without monitor. But I didn't never got any Black Pentium Pro's.
@@kaiserped that server I was talking about came to me already when I was using two amd socket-a processors on my machine. sometimes something becomes stored because of its intrinsic value.
I would guess VGA is probably better suited to the environment, too. Food, heat, moisture, grease etc. In my experience, the sockets survive a lot more abuse.
I work for a company in Australia that still makes devices with Vortex86DX chips for traffic control embedded systems and power system SCADA (System Control And Data Acquisition). I think our designs were done in the mid to late 2000s, with some updates in the mid 2010s for newer form factors with software back compatibility due to the same underlying chips. The industry is moving towards Linux on ARM, but the long life, support. and certification requirements of many commercial products mean these are still made new today. We actually had a bricked board a few weeks ago during a bios update. The bios SPI flash is inside the SOC and requires a specific parallel port to JTAG adapter from DM&P connected to a Windows PC (Probably win9x) to recover it. We have lost the parallel port adapter so it was quicker and cheaper to just replace the entire Vortex86 BGA chip.
Great video, just a note, here in Brazil most monitors sold have VGA, then you find monitors with VGA and HDMI in less quantity, and finally monitors with Display Port.
This is why the kitchens I worked in just used mini PCs for the order screens and desktop PCs for the POS system. Much much much much much cheaper for a more powerful product
I never thought I was going to watch a _This Commercial Kitchen Appliance Uses an Original Pentium Clone CPU (and Runs DOS)!_ video today, but I did - and it was interesting. :)
Just randomly stumbled into your channel with this video and I'm absolutely delighted. I subscribed already, I'll check your back catalog in a bit. Keep up the good work my dude.
I service bump bars. They are usually implemented as a permanently mounted monitor that will never get replaced, an easily replaceable but inconveniently mounted control module, and an equally easily replaceable bump bar. They are exposed to airborne grease. I use safety glasses and multiple sets of gloves when servicing these devices and they are very slippery. Those of you who haven’t been to a commercial restaurant kitchen can’t imagine the amount of grease that’s in the air and on the floor. You must wear anti-slip shoes whenever you step into the kitchen area. The control units used to run a custom OS, but now they run an emulator running that OS on Windows CE. The most common failure is the bent pin in the PS/2 cable between the control unit and the bump bar. Control units are difficult to access in a rush and when an employee tries to reconnect the PS/2 cable they sometimes bend the pin. The device still receives power and lights up but the buttons are inoperable. Similarly, power jacks must be robust. I have seen plenty of broken power jacks. By integrating the control unit into the bump bar and thus eliminating the brittle PS/2 cable, they increase reliability of the system. The tiny speaker is important. Kitchen appliances confirm all input with audible beeps.
The reason it uses vga is because monitors which have both vga and HDMI capabilities usually jump to HDMI as a default. When you switch between menu screens using this pad sometime's the monitor thinks its lost its signal and defaults back to HDMI. I work in a pub and it happens all the time, we now just buy cheap vga monitors online and they work fine.
And monitors are going to be very low on the priority list for replacement as long as they still serve their purpose, so even when upgrading the "brains" of a POS system, it's common to reuse as much of the old system as possible including displays and printers.
I have two Sega Genesis model two systems that are the same revision, VA3, that came out of different factories at different times as I recall. One of them has cracked joints on the power input and on the controller ports. The other one has some improvements. I forget if the power input is reinforced or modified the same way here, but they did improve it. It's definitely a common problem, as you point out and good to see they took care of that with this thing. As for the Genesis controller port, they changed the design to use long pins to take the stress off the board itself.
Many years ago, I was in a McDonald's restaurant, and the order system was using a Tandy Model 100. It had been re-cased in stainless steel with only a few keys remaining, but the shape was unmistakable. It was connected to an external monitor, of course. I was unable to determine if this was a one-off custom job or if other locations had the same hardware.
This is a make station checkoff. It replaced paper receipts. The order shows on the screen you fill the order then press the number of the order to close it off the screen. Its robust enough to be mounted on fryer… these are at every make area.
"probably permanently mounted somewhere" Yeah I've worked in fast food and trust me - the speed at which you have to work in those places means drop testing is absolutely necessary..!! It's ridiculously easy to bang into something and have everything collapse. I once pulled out the deep fat fryers to clean behind them and managed to trip the electrics for all of them, for example :o
Ah, so that's why the displays at Mc Donalds always look like old MS DOS programms that run in text mode.
Actually McDonald's uses fully fledged PCs for each screen which network boot a version of Windows Embedded off of a server. Then after booting it runs their KVS software on top. It just hasn't changed because it is simple and easier to learn.
@@liamloveridge9358 It's funny because one time at my local McDonald's the order collection screen was stuck on a BSOD. 😁
@@FlyboyHelosim you should see it when they all go down at once 😅
@@liamloveridge9358 Different locations use different order systems. The brand new McDs across the street from me uses one of these.
Just what I was gonna say
PC speaker, PS/2 splitter and 4MB graphics memory? Sounds like a fine PC to run vanilla Doom on. 😀
Ah Doom... But can it run DOS OpenCrysis?
@@googleadministrator3994 i though Crysis have DOS port/remake, then i look up, there's none :(
More like Quake.
4 megs is enough to run some 1600x1200 goodness.
TheRasteri is on the case...
Former McDonald's manager here. You should see the way they have those restaurants set up. At one point, my store was using devices running Windows XP Embedded (the POS), Linux (the KVS), and Unix (the Back Office Server). The fact they were able to get all this software running together in tandem across these different OS's absolutely blew my mind. Then, when we upgraded our systems, the POS (point of sale, the registers) were running Windows 7 Embedded, and we no longer use the Unix interface in the back office servers, but still amazes me how flawlessly they can get all these different systems running. It's all rather amazing, until you have an issue.
Why is that so amazing? Computers running every operating system in existence (some you've never even heard of) all exchange information using the internet all the time. As long as the interfaces and protocols are well defined, there's no issues exchanging data between different systems. You're just used to software written by incompetent people, or people that didn't care if it worked correctly or not.
@@gorak9000 it's McDonald's. You want to talk incompetent, look no further.
@@JoePro Your router probably runs Linux on an MIPS or ARM architecture, yet your x64 architecture Windows computer communicates with it flawlessly -- and you probably set it all up!
@@rexsceleratorum1632 they don't really communicate though
@@JoePro They indeed do. In fact the router is mostly what the computer communicates with, because beyond the local NAT, it's a whole different network.
later in 2077: This Commercial Kitchen Appliance Uses an Original Threadripper Clone CPU
Good question. Will these kind of dump embedded computers die out? I assume that cheap arm tablets will be the future.
In 2077 there will be no staff to push buttons, Except for the upscale places that has real people servicing you. A robot makes the fries already at McDonalds and the customers punches in their orders. Robot pizza- and noodle places are somewhat common in Japan. The single highest cost in a restaurant is wages, so there is tremendous pressure to automate that sector.
@@Tore_Lund In 2077 there will be no people.
@@typedef_ love your optimism.
@Hexilus _It will be essential to display a rotating three-dimensional model of the customer's meal._ 👍
The Motorola 68000 is like 40+ years old and it's modern counterparts are also still being used in many modern applications to this day, including radiation hardened versions used on spacecraft
Like Ti-89 graphing calculators
Ti-83 until the color versions used a zilog z80 clone!
@ The 68k was only used in the Ti-89 series, Ti-92 series and Voyage series. The Ti-84 Plus has a regular Z80 but the Ti-84 Plus CE has an EZ80
@HIDLad001 What about the Excelsior, Reliant and Discovery series?
@ Those too
I have and did a video about an MSTI PDX-1000 thin client, which uses the Vortex86DX chip running at 1 GHz. It's also based on a 586/Pentium-class CPU but the DX version lacks MMX. It came with a lightweight version of Linux, but can run any OS within the limits of its hardware capabilities, including DOS and Windows XP.
Hey it's you Vwestlife. I love your interesting videos, especially about the 100,000 in 1 video game disk.
@@timmyfan6194 "155,000" in 1! That's one of his very new videos, I've been watching him for at least 10 years now.
@@timmyfan6194 Same
@@IbbiAhmed Me2
like the VIA eden "x86" processor. only ran programs compiled for it.
I've noticed this thing being used at Wendy's. The "Clear" button is worn out because they push it every time they complete an order.
Wendy's doesn't use these exact ones but they use one very similar it's not this company I can tell you I work at Wendy's
@@charlesmckee4719 They are franchises. The licensing companies might have a lot of control over what foods are prepared and how, but a lot of things are variable and depend on the owner, who may own just one or several franchise stores. I don't know if you've ever seen one of these chains in another country, or even different parts of your country, but equipment, computers, microwaves, anything that is not related to cooking signature food in very particular ways, might be different, although it might often be the same if they get the equipment at franchise discounts.
Yakov Smirnoff would joke "In Russia, McDonalds serves beer. When I first went to a McDonalds in America, I tried to order beer and people around me laughed "We don't have beer at McDonald's here!" I felt dumb and embarrassed, but then I thought, "No beer? but that means all these fools are here for the food!" I laughed and felt better.
@@charlesmckee4719 The ones I used were a Panasonic MC Switch.
Sir, this is a Wendy’s
I bet it could run Doom.
Not gonna lie, I wish I was in a position where I could try to hack the thing.
@@ThisDoesNotCompute I was waiting you to try a bootable DOS SD card or FAT USB drive tbh :D
Cool little thing! if someone could make a board with Soundblaster compatible sound and something like voodoo 1 compatible graphics it would be just perfect for DOS! And maybe a pre-configured/configurable boot menu to automatically adjust the clock speeds/disable cache/adjust available memory at startup, so you can go from an 8088/286/386/486 up to the Pentium MMX days depending on the DOS era games you want to experience, that would be the *perfect* retro DOS platform
@Robert F you could possibly have a usb audio/graphics, audio at least, dont know if the system would support graphics.
Someone please make this happen!
Bet? I am SURE! LOL!
I used to work in POS support- these were typically called a "Bump Bar." edit: This is a really advanced bump bar compared to what we supported a decade ago. And it supports external bump bars in addition to its own buttons!
I can't speak for all but Burger King still uses dumb bump bars which are basically just buttons and an encoder sending pulses to the central box over RJ11. The difference being in recent years the central "Kitchen Minder" systems have been getting replaced with a touch screen Linux based computer from SICOM called the "Chef".
Correct, this is not your typical bum bar keypad but an all-in-one solution, instead of separate pad+thin client.
I _currently_ work in POS support and I support for a couple of different national chains that use this exact device. They do still call it a "Bump Bar". They use it for the simplified installation over the more common solution of a separate thin client and dumb keypad.
"Bump Bar" sounds like it could be hip-hop slang for "brothel".
Yeah I instantly recognized this. I supported McD's, Tim Hortons, and... one other system. I can't remember now, it was a long time ago.
Worked at McD's and can tell you these things took a beating. Had one that was sluggish to work until the kitchen warmed up and I guess the bad solder made contact lol
Geeze, kitchen was hot enough to melt solder? Must have been a sweaty workplace.
@@BenderdickCumbersnatch it doesn't really have to fully melt, just heat up enough to help make contact
@@BenderdickCumbersnatch No, not melting. Just thermal expansion.
I used to work in a commercial kitchen and I may have an explanation for why we use systems like these:
It just works.
While the Front Of House is going from table to table to receive, input, and deliver orders and the Back of House is prepping, preparing, and cooking the food the last thing you want is for a complex backbone of your system to stop working. A failure in these devices increases time for both parts of the system to effectively communicate with each other.
A key idea to keep in mind is "the more moving parts something has, the more likely something is going to go wrong". If a complex machine that is integral to your system goes down are you going to be able to fix it? Do you need someone to specialize in fixing it? If the answer is yes, do you have the money to employ or contract people to fix it? How much time will it take for them to respond?
A commercial kitchen is a faced paced environment. Stress levels are high and the last thing you want is to add more for your cooks/servers. These devices are so simple that anyone can use it. Adding a layer of complexity, no matter how small, impairs the entire team.
It stays because it works; proven over time.
I used to work with these. The worst problem was the dc jack coming off the board. That and the membrane keypad breaking up. Both of which were relatively easy to fix. I think the chip was 386 based and was plenty powerful enough for this application.
Obligatory “the iPad at home” joke
And man I feel you on that harness around the AC jack. One of the reasons I taught myself to solder was on account of the fact that I got so tired buying new CD players (this was the 90s still, so not cheap) when I’d inevitably break the headphone jack. Always hated how flimsy they were.
Yeah. it's a great Idea, and I'm glad they made an effort, but sadly it's not terribly effective. I do Tech support for a couple of national chains that use this exact device. The top 2 failure modes for this device are 1 - membrane keypad wearing out, and 2 - Damaged DC power jack.
I just removed mine and soldered a cable directly and put a external jack.
@@monad_tcp Some laptops no longer have the jack soldered directly to the board but rather connect to a cable instead. After replace too many jacks I was happy to see that.
Were you inserting the headphone jack at ramming speed? I've been pretty rough with mine, but the only time I managed to move the jack out of place is by dropping the CD player on a plugged in jack. Were you buying cheap KOSS or RCA CD players?
@@the_kombinator Never had an issue with headphone jacks...talking about power jacks.
As far as it being drop tested, it's usually placed under a small monitor above the french fry station and the spot where finished orders are placed. There could be an earthquake, there could be a fire, someone might just be mad that they accidently received extra onions and then decide to take it out on the kitchen gadgets. Anything is possible.
I would be taking one home after receiving extra onions too.
ice cream machine explosions are a major source of hazards
Those thin painted trace ribbon cable connectors are never to be opened after the device has been in a greasy environment.
Having recognized the display font, I always assumed those displays were connected to literal PCs running DOS or something unix-esque, so the idea that it's got a pentium in it isn't any kind of shock at all.
4:15 The first generations probably failed from a broken-off DC jack, so they reinforced it. And VGA, RS232 and RS485 are still super-common with kitchens, like printers.
Same with retail. PC companies adopted USB, in part to get users to buy more things. If tech doesn't have a special advantage, it doesn't get updated. There's lots of 386 and 486 single board computers still sold for industrial equipment, with all the old ports. The problem is that they are mostly made and sold in bulk. If you try to buy a single one for DOS gaming, it will be nearly as much as a new PC.
@@squirlmy That's a bit undifferentiated. USB has a lot of advantages for a computer used in a desktop environment, as does HDMI over VGA. USB consolidated a lot of different connection types into a single standard, and overall reduces cost while giving better performance. It's just that for PoS, no one cares about performance, it just doesn't give any meaningful advantage there, and keeping the old standard means that it will be backwards compatible with older equipment.
@@graealex It's not so much that they don't care about those advantages, it's that they care even more about stability. That stuff has to work, day in and day out. So any bit of complexity that can be avoided is avoided.
Remember that Microsoft USB demo (or was it PnP?) that demo'ed their bluescreen instead? And the USB-keyboard-during-boot issues? Even on my "not that old" PC the USB-keyboard works in the BIOS and in Windows, but not on the Windows "how do you want to boot after that crash?" screen.
@@HenryLoenwind That's a nice sentiment, but the truth is that RS232 is too slow for most desktop applications, including a simple color printer. Upper limit is 1 Mbit/s, that's fine for a text-only ticket, but not for full-page raster images.
@@graealex tell that to every automotive parts shop that still uses impact printers, interface speed is hardly the limiting factor.
This is very interesting. I work part-time in a kitchen and we have a similar system. I'd never given much thought to how the system works until I was working late one night and at 12:30am the whole system does a daily reboot, and as it was coming back online I saw it run through the process of initializing all the kitchen screens before I caught a glimpse of "starting MS DOS".
It's pretty crazy how these ancient systems are still relied upon in so many applications, but sometimes you really do just need a simple, barebones system that is bulletproof and will just work no matter the circumstances. I remember one day we had a power cut for about an hour, and just before it happened I had some tickets on the screen. When the power came back, after a couple of beeps the system came right back and all the tickets were still there waiting, it even kept track of the time they were on!
Be carful when working with old brittle plastic, guys. Just put a small screwdriver thru my middle finger last week when trying to fix an old digital thermometer. I was holding it in my left hand when trying to undo the inner screws to the motherboard when the whole thing just broke into pieces in my hand and I jammed the screwdriver thru my finger. Thankfully it didn’t hit anything vital so it’s pretty much healed right now, but it was definitely one of the freakiest accidents I’ve been involved in.
Lesson learned. Never screw or unscrew anything in your hand, on your lap or other bodyparts. Use table or something. :) glad that you didn't stab yourself any worse than that. My dad stabbed himself right in the thigh back in the day. Could've been fatal.
*ouch*
I feel this, has happened to me a lot of times,.
Had it happen a few times to me, luckily didn't break the skin, but hurt like hell.
Had an AC adapter (not DC)'s case crumble when I was unplugging it (HOLY FUCKBALLS!), so I shut off the powerbar and waited 30 seconds before unplugging it. I wouldn't be here still if I didn't take prompt action. :o
I was cutting a D sized battery in half to get the graphite rod.
I had the battery in a vice.
The hack saw slipped and it hit my thumb.
If you hold your thumb upwards, it cut my thumb vertically. It cut 2 mm of nail.
There wasn't much bleeding but it hurt a lot.
I put electrical tape on my thumb so that the fingernail doesn't get caught on cloths fibers or while I'm sleeping, get caught in the bed fibers.
Remember, if the ladies don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy.
In the year 2000 I worked for a small Point-of-Sale manufacturer. They had a lot of devices that used off-brand 386 CPUs and ran MS-DOS. I thought those were outdated back then. Crazy to see stuff like this still being produced in 2021. Thanks for the video!
I always watch your videos in my downtime at work on Fridays, so seeing your videos in my sub box always evokes those happy Friday vibes.
IIRC that LPDDR3 will run at much lower power than older RAM chips so it could have been a 2 birds 1 stone kinda design decision on their part.
I don't think power consumption is a big design concern when there's one 64 Mb (mega bits, not bytes) ram chip, and it's plugged into the wall for power anyway.
The touchscreen feature is so that you can bump orders directly pressing the display. Where I work this is done with thin clients hooked to touchscreens, and there's a physical "dumb" bump bar keypad just in case the touchscreen functionality fails at some busy moment, so you don't have to forcibly restart the windows powered thin client to reload the touch drivers.
I really like just how bespoke they've made this device, it's a true "Purpose Built" machine rather than something generic being loosely repurposed for a given task, as happens so often these days.
A current product but a design philosophy from the good old days.
Thank you for sharing!
Plus, if they used an Arduino, people would clone it.
Except it sounds like it's a full blown SoC implementing a pretty complete x86 instruction set. I highly doubt an order system needs a FPU for example
agreed - the POS systems are often unreliable because they are build on embedded Windows. The displays in the kitchens, running this basically never break. I had one of these when I worked in Wetherspoon, and without it we would have drowned in orders. Its super reliable, has multiple monitors for the different stations, and even a different display for when you "bump" the order to the serving staff.
That's embedded computing for you, yep!
@@chootastic Windows is, honestly, rarely the problem. POS vendors (and their spec customers) just put the most insane software stacks _on top of_ Windows.
One of the worst I ever had to support was POSReady 2009 running a real-time Java x86 emulator to boot Linux, which then had a Java _remote desktop_ client to access an Windows desktop running virtualized on the office server - which were generally quad-core, fixed-clock Xeons - locked down to IE (for inventory lookup, as an ActiveX applet) and _another_ Java emulator to run OS/2 (!?) for the actual POS software. And they couldn't understand why even late-generation, desktop Core i7 systems were still dog-slow . . ..
Now let's talk abour Mars Rover CPU :)
You mean Power PC?
@@radimkolar2270 Yeah, the 750 that was used in G3 Macs and which provided the base for the chip inside the GameCube and Wii.
....Ah radiation hardened CPUs.
And 2 of them too 😀 but now there is a new chip on Mars, checkout what is inside the helicopter!
@@alexdhall IDK if you knew already, but the Space Shuttle was still using 8086 chips even as Pentiums were coming out, because they were less resistant to cosmic radiation. They couldn't just upgrade, they had to build things like lead-lined enclosures for circuitry finer than the 8086's 3 microns (3000 nanometers. Typical ARM chips now are 7 nanometers) RAM is also sensitive to SEUs (Single event Upsets), and Single Event Effects.
In the early 2000's I was working at a Steel mill where the Process Control unit (similar to a PLC) was based on a custom board running a Intel Pentium 2 chip and a real-time Unix OS ( we had to run 4 to control one rolling mill). Around 2012 we wanted to upgrade and the latest product was based on a Pentium 3 , which was out of production for 5 years already! They booted off a compact flash card that couldn't be bigger than 8MB... oh the good old days.
I enjoyed that even in the mid '00s, bowling alleys near me still used computers for the score display that were very obviously outputting CGA. Two palettes it would cycle between- green/brown/red, or white/magenta/cyan.
The bowling alley near me in the late 2000s was still using a probably made in the 1980s system, with B&W and color CRTs...
The bowling alley near me was still using a 1950s optical system until they closed in the 2000s. Other than the cash register and maybe some cameras I doubt there were any semiconductors in the building.
Haha Brunswick Bowling I think used EGA, the one near me.
Bowling Alleys near me are tragically pretty modern.
@@bangerbangerbro They are now - they changed it all in 2019 or so, then Covid happened. Not sure if they're open. Those EGA screens were in there since the mid 90s lol.
They added the wire around the DC jack becaus they have seen your FLUKE networkanalyzer video! :-)
Greetings, Doc64!
When I worked at McDs these things would fall pretty often. Probably good that they're drop tested haha.
This is basically a stripped down pc/104 device. That is why these old style chips still exist.
I think a lot of products like this exist because the source code is long gone for some binary library and they have to continue maintaining x86 compatability with it.
security is another issue actually, you have no idea how anal some fast food chains are about their internal network.
Backwards compatibily with older sotware *and hardware*. Changing software is also a hassle.
Yep, we had these when I worked at Pizza Hut. They were not permanently mounted though, they sat on top of the make stations with their monitors so you could press the buttons. They did constantly fall off and we did have to restart them often because they crashed all the time. Never knew it was a Pentium inside, I'd considered buying one for the novelty until I saw the prices.
Ours only had 2 buttons: green and red.
EDIT: You actually showed this, neat
VGA is used because in a lot of these industrial settings it's still very common to see them. Obviously this isn't a performance gaming machine and let's be honest you'll never see it do much of anything impressive on that display, so using the more expensive connector and forcing thousands of upgrades to more modern monitors is not in their interest.
You can easily get a VGA adapter anyways if you wanted to run it on newer screens. This way the customer doesn't have to upgrade all their screens. I don't think it'd be easy to run an old CRT VGA monitor off of a DP port, but I could be wrong.
@@AnonymousGentooman or crash your computer because they’re trying to draw more power than the hdmi port wants to provide.
I waited for you to say: "And now let's run DOOM on this!". Next episode maybe?
that would happen if this was an LGR thing
So glad to see this as I have always wondered what the kitchen monitors used in fast food restaraunts looked like they were running some sort of DOS compatible hardware
...everybody thought the same: "it runs Dos... then it MUST run DOOM!" 🤟🤩💥
EXACTLY!!!
Literally came here to say make it run doom
doom is eternal 😁😄💪
No orders would ever go out. Just doom played alllllllll day
But can it run Crysis? 🤔
This is so cool! I've seen these in fast food establishments for years and always wondered what they do. Thanks for doing this!
I remember reading about the Rise mp6 CPU back in the late 90's. I remember reading a review about one online and it was slower than the Winchip. No wonder why it didn't last long. But it's fascinating to see old technology still being used today.
Its crazy where you find older CPU's and other components. They use truly ancient chips in things like the Mars rovers because they've been around so long and pretty much any issues there could be with them have been seen and fixed/worked around over the years. They used some old POWER3 or 4 chips (can't recall off the top of my head) for Curiosity that had massive radiation shielding added. Their more simple architecture also means they're less likely to fail or get messed up. Bit flipping is a thing with cosmic rays, so they're hardened against that by virtue of simply pushing fewer bits (on top of other things).
@@TalesOfWar Agreed. In space design there are approved parts lists where each item has gone through rigorous testing, analysis, hardening, etc. Not limited to CPUs or even active components. The expense to add items to the list is obviously higher for active components, and higher still for complex ones. In the end, it's the simple matter that you can't exactly service them after the fact. Cost of adding items to the list VS cost of servicing in case of failure in space VS cost to use already approved parts.
@@TalesOfWar They used the BAE RAD5500. BAE Systems is basically the only company that produces radiation hardened CPUs. They're all PowerPC offshoots for some reason.
@@poisonouslead85 PowerPC is still well supported and a license costs little to nothing.
Here 3 years in the future. Rasteri and Eivind have built several Retro DOS PCs around this SoM.
* WeeCee
* Tiny Llama (1, 2)
* ITX Llama
I'm glad you covered this.
You can literally just buy an industrial board based on one, e.g. Diamond Systems, and put it in a wood box like I have done.
USB mouse and PS/2 keyboard. The ultimate combo.
Is it bad that that would probably be better for latency on the keyboard?
@@CTMKD Currently... PS/2 is still a much better interface for keyboards than USB (at least assuming that you don't bother with hotswapping), but USB is a much better interface when it comes to mice.
Yeah, PS/2 keyboards have lower latency than USB keyboards. They also don't rely as heavily on drivers, and often have true n-key rollover.
PS/2 mice on the other hand... The way that mice actually work is just far better suited to USB instead. I'm glad nobody uses PS/2 mice anymore.
Yup, I remember reading about that a while ago... PS2 uses hardware interrupts right? If so, it will always have far far less latency than USB... doesn't matter if it's USB 1.1 or Thunderbolt 7... anything that *polls* will always be higher latency than something that *interrupts* right?
Or because you are still using a special form factor keyboard with a non standard layout, like at a cash register. The electric parts supplier here uses some old DOS software for inventory and sales, and they still have a barcode scanner attached to the PS/2 keyboard cable with a splitter.
@@AmaroqStarwind what's wrong with PS/2 mice? I've written code for them, and it seems like a reasonable interface. It could use more bits of precision though.
If Gravis (the host from the CathodeRayDude youtube channel) hasn't seen this and eaten up every word, I'll be surprised as all hell
National Semiconductor (Texas Instruments) had their own Pentium class embedded chip named the Geode. It was sold on and at one point became an AMD product. That product line also included a slightly different Cyrix CPU design, differentiated by a few letters at the end. There's a Wikipedia article for the series, though I have only used the original design in a Soekris displayless board.
I'm sure this product has been re-engineered multiple times over the years as well. You can see they have two footprints for the flash memory, that's a part that very commonly goes obsolete and needs replacement. Another interesting thing I wonder how they implemented is the MTBF counter. I wonder how they read that back? It's got a connector for the JTAG so maybe over that. Anyway I work with embedded devices and it's always interesting to see how other people do it. My company here in the Twin Cities has made a ton of Windows CE products and, while they're in very different applications to this, much of it is the same.
Alternate title: "This iPAD runs DOS"
The drop test was probably done as a "sure why not" because it usually comes as a packaged deal with *vibration* tests which I'm sure you can imagine are much more applicable to a product like this.
Nearly every commercial electronics product undergoes *packaged* shock/vibe/drop tests to get their ISTA 3A and/or FedEx certification--if your product and packaging pass those tests then shipping carriers are more likely to take responsibility for damage. Unpackaged/bare unit tests tend to be more for higher end stuff or just up to the company designing it.
Bars and restaurants usually have a touchscreen POS system. They have a lot of items. That's how Starbucks was setup back when I worked there 10+ years ago.
They do now. But there are still a lot of these types of systems out there. (BK, McD's, etc.) I can remember working on the POS systems in a Panda Express and Chic-fil-a -- very "retro" touch screens that used rows of LEDs lining the edge of the screen. (and citrix terminals for auto parts stores. for the record, they still use the same AS400 backend, but the tn3270 program runs on the native windows PC terminal... parts inventory: web app, POS: tn3270.)
That's what the McDonalds have where I live
While a touchscreen setup makes sense for a POS (=point of sale), you'd rather want something like this HID with a simple display in a kitchen environment.
@@jfbeam the POS is a touch screen but the kitchen still uses membrane buttons like this device. It’s a combo of both.
As a former fast food worker, I got haunted by hearing “bump” and “order” together
Why? :P
Supporting these at a call center was not less stressful. Not unheard of to get 60-80 calls a shift. All from pimply faced arrogant teenagers yelling at you that the system is down. I barely had time to close a ticket before the next call came in. You'd be surprised how often these things break on the national level (This was in Canada) - I wonder if there was a period of 5 minutes where all McD's restaurants in the nation were actually working properly. Job turnaround was high, but it paid really well for what it was so I stuck through it as long as I could to pay for college. IIRC I got fired from that place due to poor performance as a result of constant OT and burnout - I couldn't focus anymore. There were guys doing lines of coke in the bathroom and shit... not a great work environment. I smiled when they told me not to come in for my next shift. Thanked them and left.
Put me through 2 years of school though :D
Boy that's a THICC thermal pad.
thermal brick
It has to conduct heat all the way to the case. Presumably whatever piece of stainless steel kitchen furniture it's screwed to acts as an additional heat sink.
i worked at walmart for a bit about 9 years ago and it was amazing how many of the back of house computers were still using crt monitors.
I still have a couple - one of which I could still make use of as it's higher resolution than any of my flat screens (and I like 4:3 displays for certain stuff with computers).
Since the Vortex86 being used in commercial applications, specifically where money is being dealt with, I think it should get the following modifications:
- Decimal floating point arithmetic. You don't want floating point errors screwing with your monetary transactions.
-...actually, that's it.
Decimal point arithmetic is easy. You just deal with all of your math in terms of cents, or maybe mills if you’re doing interest calculations.
I don't think that these are handling financial stuff at all, that would be done by the POS system that connects to a server that connects to one of these. These are just used for displaying the food orders.
@@fluffycritter Decimal points aren't easy for modern computers to deal with because of their binary floating point units.
@@AmaroqStarwind My point is that if you deal with the currency in the form of cents/mills, then you never have to handle it as a floating point value. It's a form of fixed-point math, which only uses integer arithmetic.
Also x86 does have support for BCD arithmetic, although there's not really any point to it when you can just treat everything in terms of cents.
@@redbeesrgd you’re right, the financial transactions are far from running on a chip like this, just the kitchen displays
That would make a really decent DOS box.
On a tangent, I hate how so many fast food places completely got rid of their fixed sign menus in favour of monitors. It's a real pain, if I'm ordering, to have to wait for the monitors to rotate through the screens to get back to my area of interest (usually chicken sandwiches) and show me all of the chicken sandwich options. I don't mind the presence of monitors to showcase things, especially the limited time menu items, but there should still be some fixed analogue menu signage.
this is the most murican comment I've ever seen. how much fast food do you consume that you even come up with a complain like this?
@@lordjaashin Canadian here. :-D
@@SteveBrandon so what? you don't need to be an American to be a murican
@@lordjaashin To answer the question, though, around once every 2 months since I can't afford to eat out much anymore.
@
This Does Not Compute I have fixed a lot of these over the last few years. The wire over the power jack does help, but it's not really enough, but there is another version of this, that you can not tell from this one without opening it up, that uses a full-length metal sleeve or the jack, and that one is better at protecting the power jack from being torqued. The issue with the second version is the sleeve and short out the power jack, and kill the board. The solder points for the metal loop wire or sleeve are not properly isolated from carrying current.
+1 for next video installing DOS / network drivers / using for retro gaming. :)
Oh my God the nightmares I've had from dealing with those LOL
Nothing is quite as nasty as opening one of those up because it stopped working and to find that it was full of grease.
If it helps the marketing information you show is correct, some of the older ones and I'm going back about 15 years did have 486 processors in them. They connect up to the Oasis controller which is the bigger blue box usually tucked up in the ceiling behind one of the monitors and that was controlled by a 386 SX.
Just wanted to say thank you for bringing my nightmares back to life!
So cool to see this video now as I am buying one of these, the Ebox 2300.
Back in 2005 or so I used to build systems (print servers, firewalls, 2u servers and such) at an OEM with factory new Intel P2 + P3 processors. When I built them I wondered where the F they got their inventory from.
Aaaand someone is gonna make a Doom port for that
It's a 486SX compatible DOS PC, there's a good chance you could just put Doom on the SD card and run it. You could even get sound effects with the PC speaker.
It's funny, I had something like this bar when I ran my pizza place in the early 2000's. I can't remember the company that made it, but like you said it was very turnkey for what it was. Amusing to think that the bar on my make line might've had as much computing power as the machine that ran our logistics. :) Thanks for the video and a look inside this little time capsule.
I can see that the CMOS battery, is made in my country, Indonesia. Yes, there is a Panasonic battery factory in Indonesia :D
It has been there for many decades in fact, I still have an old National battery, made in Indonesia with expiry date of 1999.
Love Indonesia ploducts
I've always wondered what was inside those things but never before remembered to look it up... Glad I'm a subscriber because you answered my at least 15 year old curiosity.
That would be cool for someone that want to make industrial retro style laptop for systems that also use a simulation chip
I was re-watching old videos already. Thanks!
A lot of these have been swapped out for what are essentially smart tvs now, a thin client or similar low power arm hardware built in to the display handles it now. It's just cheaper overall.
Yeah, thankfully there are a few newer companies actually trying to push this technology forward - I’ve seen some even just build an iPad app instead of use boutique hardware.
@@ThisDoesNotCompute an iPad instead of an iPAD. Nice.
@@ThisDoesNotCompute I've seen a lot of new restaurant management systems that use iPads everywhere, and that gets expensive fast. Especially once you start throwing in the accessories like armour cases so the staff don't destroy them (it'll still happen eventually, just might take longer), or the customers from stealing them... that happened to a couple clients of mine that didn't follow my advice to literally lock them down to the counter, but at least it lead to immediate new work contracts for security camera installations 😂
When I worked at a Burger King we had a system similar to this. It was a Micros by Epson and it ran Windows CE.
The software running might be written direct to the "metal" once upon a time (not even an MS-DOS application). Then it's just cheaper to find compatible components to keep it running.
That’s that an embedded system is, no os, just runs a single task that waits on input
@@johnsimon8457or something like a BASICA ROM on EEPROM?
That's fancier than any bump bar I've ever seen. The restaurants I've worked in usually have them connected to the KDS via separate network CPU that's then fed to a server in the office. Only input on the board is a proprietary connector that kinda looks like a Svideo input.
I’m guessing you’ll find something similar driving the autopilot in a Boeing 777. And I’m not being derogatory.
I used to work at a McDonalds in the UK, up until 2020. I can confirm they were still using a computer similar to this.
Why not use ARM instead? It would use less power, the chips are more available, and can use a smaller form factor.
Likely because the POS software is going to be PC based and to make it easier to integrate they used an Intel compatible chip.
Software compatibility problem.
Pretty cool. You don't normally hear much about these sorts of things, so it's nice to hear something.
now that's an ipad
Side note, my old workplace used an AS400 based system for warehousing, inventory, POS.... everything. Amazingly fast, stable and simple. Once you got your menu numbers memorised that system was wicked fast. I'm glad they still use it. Sometimes stripping stuff back to bare bones truly is the way forward. A lot of airlines still use a CLI front end at checkin. Both major airlines I worked for had gumballed a lot of fancy GUI & customer interactivity elements onto the very very powerful CLI/database driven ticketing/reservations system. You could delete whole flights if you wanted. Hate to be responsible for security on that. Probably leaks like a sieve .
Is it a (north) American thing to have such old parts in these kind of devices? I used to develop similar stuff and here it's like all modern stuff. Mostly ARM these days.
Most work on some kind of mysql database, all lcd with hdmi
I guess it breaks down to "don't fix what ain't broken": if you developed a working solution 15 years ago and can still sell it today, why invest in RnD for something new?
Of course, if you're going to develop a solution today, you'll use what's available today. Including the obvious hardware overkill, software overhead, and myriad of ways it'll break/fail until you've got it all worked out.
Why would this thing need to access a DB? This is a display. There's a rack on site that's hosting the DB and serving info to the displays. The POS is going to be interfacing with the DB on the rack, this thing just needs to receive and display the info that is getting pushed from the rack.
@@poisonouslead85 Most companies I know of use a database for business analysis. That can be anything, but basically comes down to how to improve and streamline things. Also it's a lot easier to update products or workflows all at once, instead of programming each individual module. Even when that's done over a network.
A lot of companies I know also would rather just buy a little PC or mini computer with an external controller. Much easier to upgrade when needed, much cheaper when the controller breaks down.
Please make more of these kinds of videos, I don't think I could work in a kitchen as it's too fast paste for me, so it's neat to learn about the tech they use there. You are right if it ain't brock don't fix it.
Anyone down to play some doom with this thing ?
I worked at a place that used one of these. Ours may have been a little bit different because I believe there was also a thin client of some sort attached to it but it was pretty easy to work with. The tickets turn yellow when they’re aging and then red when they’ve passed the acceptable threshold set by the manager. Pretty slick actually
I like content like this
Very nicely made from the electronic engineering point of view. Thing of beauty, joy for ever. A learning opportunity here.
I'd still put the DVI out on it, in case of new deployments - VGA inputs are increasingly harder to find on new gear, and the DVI has been around for two decades, so any user who had anything to do with computers will know what it's for.
Some new monitors still have a VGA input, though -- especially those meant for commercial or industrial settings. So I can see why they've stuck with it on at least one model.
This video made me think that I should resurrect my Pentium Pro OverDrive.
What speed? I have machine 4x Pentium Pro 200,512 L2, 1gb ram, 2gb Max.. front panel touch screen for check few things without monitor. But I didn't never got any Black Pentium Pro's.
@@jannejohansson3383 It's 333 MHz. I had to buy the compatible socket 8 board from eBay at that time.
@@kaiserped that server I was talking about came to me already when I was using two amd socket-a processors on my machine. sometimes something becomes stored because of its intrinsic value.
I would guess VGA is probably better suited to the environment, too.
Food, heat, moisture, grease etc.
In my experience, the sockets survive a lot more abuse.
I've used ones with full d-pads and with a few other buttons so the extra pins make sense, but here is the important question, can it run doom?
Yes, albeit without proper sound (no music, PC Speaker sound effects).
Great video!! Never knew commercial kitchens are running such kool retro hardware!!
The original iPad.
Way before Apple even made it lol
Thank you. You help me to broden my eyes. There used to be Transmeta, Rise, WinChip, and etc. It's good to see Rise has find a new market.
Transmeta----> Esperanto Risc V open intruction set. Return to the future
How come no one of you cares about the fact that it's named iPad.
I care
it took 3 years but someone noticed the iPad before the iPad
I work for a company in Australia that still makes devices with Vortex86DX chips for traffic control embedded systems and power system SCADA (System Control And Data Acquisition). I think our designs were done in the mid to late 2000s, with some updates in the mid 2010s for newer form factors with software back compatibility due to the same underlying chips.
The industry is moving towards Linux on ARM, but the long life, support. and certification requirements of many commercial products mean these are still made new today.
We actually had a bricked board a few weeks ago during a bios update. The bios SPI flash is inside the SOC and requires a specific parallel port to JTAG adapter from DM&P connected to a Windows PC (Probably win9x) to recover it. We have lost the parallel port adapter so it was quicker and cheaper to just replace the entire Vortex86 BGA chip.
Great video, just a note, here in Brazil most monitors sold have VGA, then you find monitors with VGA and HDMI in less quantity, and finally monitors with Display Port.
This is why the kitchens I worked in just used mini PCs for the order screens and desktop PCs for the POS system. Much much much much much cheaper for a more powerful product
I work in a laboratory. Sometimes VGA is used just because all of the decades old instruments use it. I can totally believe restaurants use it too :)
I never thought I was going to watch a _This Commercial Kitchen Appliance Uses an Original Pentium Clone CPU (and Runs DOS)!_ video today, but I did - and it was interesting. :)
Just randomly stumbled into your channel with this video and I'm absolutely delighted. I subscribed already, I'll check your back catalog in a bit. Keep up the good work my dude.
I service bump bars. They are usually implemented as a permanently mounted monitor that will never get replaced, an easily replaceable but inconveniently mounted control module, and an equally easily replaceable bump bar.
They are exposed to airborne grease. I use safety glasses and multiple sets of gloves when servicing these devices and they are very slippery. Those of you who haven’t been to a commercial restaurant kitchen can’t imagine the amount of grease that’s in the air and on the floor. You must wear anti-slip shoes whenever you step into the kitchen area.
The control units used to run a custom OS, but now they run an emulator running that OS on Windows CE.
The most common failure is the bent pin in the PS/2 cable between the control unit and the bump bar. Control units are difficult to access in a rush and when an employee tries to reconnect the PS/2 cable they sometimes bend the pin. The device still receives power and lights up but the buttons are inoperable. Similarly, power jacks must be robust. I have seen plenty of broken power jacks.
By integrating the control unit into the bump bar and thus eliminating the brittle PS/2 cable, they increase reliability of the system. The tiny speaker is important. Kitchen appliances confirm all input with audible beeps.
I remember buying a Vortex 386 SBC 25+ years ago
The reason it uses vga is because monitors which have both vga and HDMI capabilities usually jump to HDMI as a default. When you switch between menu screens using this pad sometime's the monitor thinks its lost its signal and defaults back to HDMI. I work in a pub and it happens all the time, we now just buy cheap vga monitors online and they work fine.
And monitors are going to be very low on the priority list for replacement as long as they still serve their purpose, so even when upgrading the "brains" of a POS system, it's common to reuse as much of the old system as possible including displays and printers.
Great video. I learned something new about a "modern" device based on what many consider obsolete technology
Wow, you'd still think a Pi would be cheaper than a custom board!
Not if you want to manufacture the same device for 20+ years. Or want to have a reputation for reliability...
I have two Sega Genesis model two systems that are the same revision, VA3, that came out of different factories at different times as I recall. One of them has cracked joints on the power input and on the controller ports. The other one has some improvements. I forget if the power input is reinforced or modified the same way here, but they did improve it. It's definitely a common problem, as you point out and good to see they took care of that with this thing. As for the Genesis controller port, they changed the design to use long pins to take the stress off the board itself.
Many years ago, I was in a McDonald's restaurant, and the order system was using a Tandy Model 100. It had been re-cased in stainless steel with only a few keys remaining, but the shape was unmistakable. It was connected to an external monitor, of course. I was unable to determine if this was a one-off custom job or if other locations had the same hardware.
This is a make station checkoff. It replaced paper receipts. The order shows on the screen you fill the order then press the number of the order to close it off the screen. Its robust enough to be mounted on fryer… these are at every make area.
"probably permanently mounted somewhere"
Yeah I've worked in fast food and trust me - the speed at which you have to work in those places means drop testing is absolutely necessary..!!
It's ridiculously easy to bang into something and have everything collapse. I once pulled out the deep fat fryers to clean behind them and managed to trip the electrics for all of them, for example :o
Very interesting device and hardware solution.
Thanks for sharing. 😉👌🏼
So basically a remote terminal with only a few buttons. Very cool!