The Fascinating History of Point-of-Sale Computers
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- Опубліковано 9 лют 2025
- This video covers the incredible history of POS (Point of Sale) computer systems, from the first mechanical cash registers to AI-powered shopping carts called smart carts. These innovative systems helped shape modern technology in many ways by pushing the bounds of what was possible and are part of the story of vintage computer history.
Top notch video, I thoroughly enjoyed this! All kinds of forgotten and missing footnotes from computer history I've never heard anyone on UA-cam discuss before.
Fantastic stuff - and also it's just nice to see another video from you, Brian! I hope you've been well.
Thank you so much, Clint! As I was learning the full impact of point of sale on computer history, I almost felt it was my duty to share this story with the world. I hope you are doing well, I know you are going through a lot with the house, but you are going to be all right.
This documentary was simply superb. The quality level of this video is near the top of what is available on UA-cam. I'm retired from a 33 year career in IT for a major university. You have done a really excellent job on this and I just wanted to let you know.
Hard agree, Also the impact on microcomputer development of the POS system completely passed me by; I think this is an academically important piece of research.
Thank you so much for the kind words. It means a lot!
"the bid was only $1"... THE SHIPPING IS $90
They said it was local, they might have gone to pick up instead of shipping it
He said he picked it up... So, bargain!
Yes, postage is often more costly than what you're buying.. Especially for heavy items! 😁..
In Australia, I've paid anywhere from the same amount as the purchase price to two or three times the purchase price for postage. However, as what I was buying was coming from 2000 kilometres away.... it makes 35 bucks for postage, cheap! (It would have cost a minimum of 600 bucks for fuel to make the trip).
This is a brilliant well done retrospec video, I'm fom Canada, and I worked as a technicain for POS, I started around 1984 I did fix mechanical ECR as NCR 24, ,52, 52s, 6000, Victor, Sweda to namae a few, after electro-mechanical models: Sanyo, Uniwell, Sweda, DTS also the first electronic scale (SL30Lbs/15Kilos) in Canada by a japanese company TEC (Tokyo Electric Company) and the full fledge computer electronics POS with Touch screen system in Canada named RMS (Restaurant Manager System) by Richard Hadler from New York. the system use Touch Screen, remote kitchen and Bar printer. and the last POS that I have worked on was a full inventory restaurant / retail system. Some of the pictures shown in this video reminded me a lot like NCR,and DTS. Well done and thank you for researching and build this very nice video.
This channel is hugely underrated! There are hidden gems in other videos on this channel, like interview with Sierra on-line founders
I made my own (second) POS from a 486 computer that ran msdos, in 98-99. I made a program in Turbo Pascal/Turbo Vision, that read the barcode (I attached a keyboard barcode scanner), calculate the total price, substracted the sold items from inventory, printed the receipt and at the end of the day printed the inventory of items that were out of stock or in low quantities. Later, I had a friend that knew well FoxPro and remade the program, improving it. He aimed to sell the software but failed, no one was interested.
The first POS I made for my small grocery store, was with a Spectrum computer around 93, that had keyboard input for the items but also kept the inventory and displayed the purchased items, prices and total on an small TV set. The program was loaded from a ROM cartridge and the database was stored on tape. I made it just because I was lazy to do the inventory each month and keep track of the stock.
Excellent documentary, I never tought of POS as a huge step for the evolution of computers.
I wrote my first POS in Paradox DOS in 1990. It could run on a 286 Laptop and used a steel wand for barcodes and a Kitchen Printer for receipts. It ran all weekend on a car battery under the table completely off-grid (credit cards was a separate radio based system). The backend could print shipping labels, make orders and receive inventory (and print price tags for items without unique UPC). Never knew the history of this tech went back that far. TNX
These sound like an awesome way to drive a QSA into an apoplectic fit
I started at a corporate McDonald's in 1980 where we had the Courier POS shown here. In fact, I drove further to get a job there because the McD closer to me still had the mechanical cash registers. The terminal must have used some type of Panaplex display panel. Each item key had a seven segment display next to it which appeared orange. I know the panel was glass because some got broken. Each terminal tied to a floor mounted central CPU box which had 2 sides for redundancy. Periodically we would flip the switch to swing over to the other side. One time I remember the switch was flipped and the magic smoke came out. We also had an electronic time clock that connected to our Silent 700 terminal that would be used daily to connect (acoustic coupler modem) to the mainframe in Chicago to transfer the days card punches and other sales data that would be manually entered.
I later got my hands on a Panasonic POS terminal as they were being tossed. This one was based on the Courier design with one digit next to each button and was based on the 6502 processor. The more items you had selected the slower the updates were. It was so bad you could see the multiplexing happening.
Interesting video! My first job as a software developer was working on a POS development team for a convenience store chain. I was later tasked to write the pay-at-the-pump interface. It was the most exciting thing I've ever worked on.
That was really interesting, you don't see a lot of talk about POS systems. Glad to see a new video from you!
Definitely not much on it. I was in it during the later IBM PXE boot/NCR 787x flying spot era right as self check out was coming on to the scene. I always figured "big business" but I guess I didn't think of it in terms of being computerized so far back. And of course they've evolved quite a bit since I was in it. Only thing that hasn't really changed it seems in forever is thermal receipt tape lol
Thank you for making this! Way too much of critical computer history is ignored because it wasn't flashy or marketed to consumers. Really obscure and "mundane" stuff needs to be studied and celebrated.
I manage a datacenter housed in a building that started its life as a mainframe nexus for NCR.
Big, massive, concrete, and probably could survive a nuclear blast.
What back then likely housed a small single installation today runs over a dozen IBM z-series mainframes (complete with all their storage, i/o, tape libraries, etc) and 50+ racks of Intel servers. And we're a *small* datacenter.
There is probably more computing power in the badge reader on the door than was in that original NCR mainframe.
Next time the one at the gas station acts up, I'm gonna remind the cashier that PoS stands for more than Point of Sale! Lol.
This was a great look at something we never think of but interact with constantly. Great job!
Also, I love that the creator of ViewTouch made it public and freely available like that, too.
Fascinating video! It’s great to see you back on UA-cam!
Great video, I worked on the IBM 4680/4690/RADOS POS systems, connected to an IBM 701 mainframe, we could sell the item at 4pm, and it was replenished the next morning, we had 4000 IBM terminals, polling data several times through out the day, over 28000 PSTN modems, the warehouse was fully mechanised, this was 1975 -97. Many companies today dont have the same ability. Thanks for the video most interesting.
Excellent presentation. I was so close to a lot of this but really missed the boat being in Louisiana and Dallas, TX instead of the Santa Clara Valley during the prime time for this technology. Thanks for the memories.
I worked for ARBA corporation in the 80's in the western Chicago suburbs. We were developing a way to modify Sanyo cash registers for inexpensive point of sale systems that would interface to a central PC over an RS-485 serial network. These systems were for small businesses that couldn't afford NCR systems and it was the first time I saw bar code readers. I worked there while getting my EE degree and left after graduating. I'm 61 and just recently found that the company is still in business.
That was great. Value content right here... Well researched, well written, and well delivered - by an actual person! Keep it up.
Terrific research, and a well-told story. Thanks for taking the time to produce this gem!
Very good video. ***** In the late 70's/early 80's I worked at Mostek so I was able to follow a most of this. And . . . now I know how Rob Collings came to be able to afford that collection of all things WWII known as the Collings Foundation.
good to see you man!
About 15-20 years ago I worked for Microworks, which makes Prism (still to this day!) POS, it was my first tech job, support job and later development job. Ours ran on Dell's when I was there, but before that they ran on diskless DOS stations using token ring networks(!!).
Fun fact: UPC scanning is based on 'fuzzy logic', which is similar to quantum probability.
Moment of silence for the NCR 787x flying spot scanner scales that found themselves submerged in gallons of milk, pounds of onion layers, and the occasional liquid cleaner that was just too much to bear. Your donations to your brethren single handedly ensured the rest of them experienced something of similar end result, long past any upgrade needs any of the equipment may have had.
I worked on point of sale equipment in the later oughts and while a lot of the equipment took a lot of crap and stood up rather well, the scanners were always amazing. Literally everything in the store goes across this unit... and as a result you find everything in the store inside them. It is amazing they worked as reliably as they did, especially considering legalities surrounding the scales. Truly an impressive design.
I started work at DTS right after I graduated from ITT in 1982. Two weeks after I started a guy from Boston sales showed up and said he bought the local DTS sales and service center in southern Indiana. It was now a private business, or dealership to serve the area around Evansville IN where I lived. I thought at the time I would work in the “cash register” industry while I waited for offers from DEC, IBM, and Xerox 😂.
I remember “programming” the DTS 571 you featured in the hospitality images.
I’ve been in the world of POS for over 40 now! I’ve worked for some great companies over the years.
Thank you for this great stroll down memory lane.
Bravo! We need more videos like this one showing how early computers actually did work Instead of always highlighting games. I would love to see a video on how computers ushered in mass use of credit cards!
This is an important documentary work. Thank you for producing.
@everyone watching: after enjoying this work, seek out one of the several Chuck Peddle interviews out there. You are likely to get a lot more out of what chuck has to say.
Great video, thanks. This brings back memories. I worked on several vertical POS systems in the 80s and 90s and crazy as it sounds they were some of the most fun projects I ever worked on.
I love those old mechanical cash registers.
Excellent, simply excellent
For a guy who started in IT (DP in the early 70s) in 1969 at a department store in Cincinnnati, this was good.
This was at Shillitos and we were a division of Federated Department Stores as were Bloomingdales and Lazarus.
In the mid-70s, I was working for Singer and doing software the worked with the Singer 902 and 925 cash registers in addtion to bace end support for Sweda 700 cash registers.
So Totalisator is why they're called tote boards! That's amazing. Thank you!
JCPenney had OCR guns with lights that scanned a special OCR font on those NCR systems.
Yes they did indeed 😊
Came expecting a whimsical look back at the worst computers to exist, but yet still leaving satisfied. Excellent video!
I lot of people had their early working years in retail and at that time their life basically revolved around the POS machine.
I love the work you've done here. I share your fondness for retro computing, especially vintage point of sale equipment.
Here in Germany (and Switzerland and Austria), in the early 1990ies, CS-IPES and CS-OPTIMA were some of the most advanced POS and inventory management systems, running on MS-DOS. They were also very futuristic development systems. You could alter the software with a keypress, at the customer's site, and later take the changes home to update the customer's version of the software. Some those installations are still in use today.
@5:41 Yes Cig smoke is most definitely friendly to the continued operation of computer tape.....
Yeah! Singer-Friden. I remember those at Sears, and the unique sound of its receipt printer.
OMG the venerable DTS 400! I used that thing for YEARS 🍔🍟🥤
I can remember back to mid 70's when I was a student of Landscape Architecture at University of Washington. I think they had a IBM System 360 or 370. We created some of the first 3D maps used in Regional Planning. We gridded maps and hand coded X,Y, and Z coordinates in Fortran. This allowed views from different directions. Our 'program' was on punched cards. We could do a dump and see every line of code on wide printer output. If you accidentally dropped your cards, it would take hours to put them in right order.
This was incredibly fascinating! But, I have to be “that guy”. Starting at 18:00. All logic mechanisms that use Boolean logic (the well known zeros and ones) use “discrete logic”, that’s simply another term for any class of logic gate. You mean to say as late as 1980 the game used TTL, transistor-transistor logic, which was the last commonly used architecture before microprocessors. After that, Moore’s Law refers to the growth in the number of transistors fit on a specified area of an IC. The lower cost to computing power ratio is a common byproduct of Moore’s Law, but Moore’s intent was never to speculate on the cost of technology as there are hundreds of other factors at play. (By the way, I worked at Nordstrom, the large fashion retailer, as a young man and as late as the late 1990s, 1998 or so, most items didn’t have upc codes, they used Nixdorf blue screen pos and inventory operations were done on paper.)
Easy instant subscribe just for the topic on it's own. I love this kind of stuff so much, thank you for putting it together!
With those Apple II vids from over ten years ago, I thought I _was_ subscribed!
Guess I was wrong! 8D (clicks button)
Thanks. I am a technology history buff. This was fascinating.
Wow, lots of interesting info in this. Welcome back!
Stumbled across that first Kroger self-checkout in Atlanta. Had no idea it was there beforehand. It was pretty neat. Nobody believed me when I tried to tell them about it. The IBM advertising pages show off a Kroger BasCart, a type of flat-top shopping cart now only found at Microcenter. Originally Kroger had those carts AND the docking system in the stores, all arranged around the POS terminal. It was a whole integrated thing and worked beautifully.
Who would have thought...simply magnificent production...wow...beautiful presentation...and obviously impeccable research ...thank you
I knew a little about the history of the cash register and the evolution into POS systems, but I learned _A LOT_ here!
Really interesting how the financial world was the first real market for electronic/computer technology.
It totally makes sense, though. And perfectly harkens back to mechanical calculators being the highest degree of mechanized progress for quite a long time.
I guess it really was always number crunching and human boredom that gave technology a purpose to serve.
Boy! What a great video. Tremendous amount of information! Thanks a lot.
Holy balls this is a great video. Already shared it with my friends, liked and subscribed.
I tell you what. This is an excellent documentary. Keep making more.
7:48 I was surprised to see Saks Fifth Avenue's old Pittsburgh, PA location! (Fun fact it was NOT on Fifth Avenue), LOL. Most of my family (including my self) worked in retail, so I'm interested in retail history, I do believe this is the first deep-dive in to the history of electronic POS systems. I have seen vids about the UPC barcodes, but none about the actual POS systems themselves. Very coo video, Thank You.
This video was incredibly informative and entertaining! Thank you for the work you put into this!
In the late '80s I was programming 6809-based POS gear in the UK. We were also in the position of recoding to save a few bytes, so we could fix a bug or add a feature. We also worked on a networked PC-based system for pubs but it was painfully slow in use.
THE RETURN OF THE KING!
re ENIAC: you need to add "Turing Complete" to your criteria in order to claim ENIAC as _first_ .
Furthermore, the original ENIAC was not programmable in the modern sense, but this was added later, allowing several other candidates to slip under the wire first.
Thank you for covering something new (well, you know what i mean) in the vintage computing niche.. Amazing video. Highly informative. You sir have gained a subscriber. :)
really excellent video. well done.
Even in the mid 90s, some retail stores still didn't use bar code scanners. I worked at Kay Bee Toys in high school and we had to type in the 6 digit code on the price sticker for every item. Made for long lines at xmas season.
Fabulous video. Great stuff and very interesting.
Wow I was about to make a joke about how I always think of another meaning from POS but WOW can't believe your back. lol
I remember going to McDonald's in the mid 70s and the order takers used a paper ticket with check boxes. The line up was out the door. How things have changed
Now we use apps
@AgentOffice indeed
My first real job was with Unitote Regitel north of Baltimore. Pretty bare bones manufacturing operation but it was pretty advanced tech for around 1977. Woodward and Lothrop used their registers, always felt weird to see them out in the real world. There were a lot of electronics manufacturers tucking in corners and the end of little side roads throughout the area back then, along with a few big players. Interesting times, lots going on and many wee to mid aged nerds having a blast playing with all the new goodies.
Well done. Certainly earned a subscription from me.
Been craving a vid like this for awhile!
This is awesome! Well researched. Keep up the good work!
That was brilliant, thank you.
Really good and interesting video! Keep making stuff like this pls
Also, regarding the staying power of 8bit processors ...
As late as the mid 2000's you could still buy, brand new, a Stern Pinball pinball machine that ran on a 6800-series processor. Even a decade *after* Stern stopped using the 6800-series on their main CPU boards, it was STILL in use on their sound boards and dot matrix display boards.
Williams/Bally was still running on 6809s when they ceased business in 1999.
Those chips ran the world, and did so for a very very very long time. There are microcontroller derivatives STILL in use today, although slowly yielding market to ARM chipsets (mainly to the proliferation of linux/android OS based embedded systems).
@5:40
"While I smoke, hand me those paper slips"
Very well done.
Great video! My mom worked at PAR Microsystems back in the mid-1980s, writing software for those POSTs. She told me that they chose alphabetical order instead of QWERTY for the Taco Bell terminals, because most teenagers didn't know how to speed type before the Internet.
(By the way, they called it "pahr", not P.A.R..)
The tote system I find to be every bit as impressive as as anything since. Just a massive amount of moving parts wires
Great video !
It’s funny, I was working at a convenience store the other day and wondering if anyone had made a breakdown of point of sales like this.
Fantastic effort 🎉
Great video! I wish you could tell more about the POS software, and how it works
What a great informative and YES interesting video. I know, I know. "Cash registers dude?" It's tech! Early tech! Origin stories are great no matter what!
Very interesting video!
Hes back!!!!
Interesting.
outstanding!
At my college in 1988, we had a donated TRS-80 Model I that was the accounting system for a local furniture retailer. We had all the 8" floppies with all the data. Around that same time, a friend had a POS system that was discarded from a local grocery store. I don't think we had any way of bringing the system up, but the hardware was there. Big steel box about the size of a micro workstation from the 1980s. Was it NCR? I don't remember.
I just finished writing an article about Peddle and I wish I had seen this first.
This was unexpected.
The same companies and names of great minds keep popping up in these stories
I was about to leave a comment along the lines of "Lindaberg Johnson? Are you sure you don't mean Lyndon Johnson?"
Then I opted to do some searching on Google and realized you were referring to Lyndon B. Johnson's daughter, "Lynda Bird Johnson".
I have no real point with this comment other than to encourage people to do some level of verification about their assumptions before spewing negativity about a video, and that this is a freakin' awesome deep-dive. I've subscribed and can't wait to see what more there is to come.
Me knowing exactly what POS means: "The fascinating history of Piece of Shit computers."
I remember when my Safeway store closed one night, and a crew came in and we tore the old "ka-chings" out and put in scanners. The computer upstairs a was very large, they were ECL logic. And we had a truck engine put above the truck bay for emergency backup. We were told if the power went out 15,000 data items would be lost. Back in the 600-1200 BAUD days. Denver was long distance telephone. Steven Spielberg 1971 Murder by the Book; Columbo
This video does not include comical sketches and interludes, which makes it great.
"..General Electric shocked the retail world.." I saw what you did there. LOL. I worked in a circa 1950s era "Mom and Pop" supermarket that did not have scanners even in the 1980s!, Just old school electromechanically operated registers. (also likely from the 1950s!) Hoo Boy did I get good at wielding a price gun! My mother worked her entire career at Sears, She probably clocked a billion keystrokes on the Singer terminals!
Growing up my family owned an independant grocery store. One of my earliest memories was being in my Dad’s office and he had this old hard drive that he used as a dècor piece. It was legitimately like 2’ x 4’ and I asked him about it when I was older. Turns out it stored all the scan data for the checkout and inventory system before they upgraded in 1995 Total capacity? 8MB 🤣
OMG I JUST ASSUMED THE THUMBNAIL WAS FOR A COMPUTER HISTORY ARCHIVES VIDEO BUT IT'S YOU
1:07 MOS integrated circuit technology was cutting edge in the 60s/70s. Calling it “all the rage” sounds like it was a fleeting fad, but the fact is that MOS technology is the bedrock of today’s electronics. When we talk about the billions of transistors in a modern CPU, those transistors are MOSFETs (metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistors). Nearly all modern electronics use MOSFETs either entirely, or for almost everything inside them. Other transistor types exist, and are used, but in vastly smaller amounts.
I heard that the US government sponsored an agreement that divided labor, but was market fixing. The deal was that Intel would do CISC, and the UK would do RISC and NCR would do cash registers. That is why the UK has Raspberry Pi. The NCR part fell apart, with the help of computer shopper magazine, IMO.
I tried asking older people when most shops started using barcodes and accepted credit cards but they all forgot or claim they showed up super recently like post 2000 and that is not true. i know they were everywhere in the late 90s and i can't remember anything from before that time. just looking at my collection of books the oldest one with a barcode was from 1983.
I remember an early barcode reader at Safeway Stores in the early 80s when my father was in management and finishing his Accounting. He previously had to do inventory management on paper and with a microfiche system to look up inventory information.
I worked at a Marshall’s store from 1976-1980. When I first got they had Singer data terminal registers. They read Kimball punched card tickets. The Singer registers were not reliable and required frequent service. About 1978 they replaced them with NCR 2151 register. The NCR registers had a hand held wand that read Optical Character Recognition tickets. The registers were more reliable, but the OCR wands were difficult to use. The cashiers hated them. You often had to scan the ticket multiple times to get a successful read.
Neither the Singer nor NCR registers processed credit cards. We used an imprinter to make a paper image of the card. There was a paper book of card numbers we were not allowed to accept. If the sale was more than fifty dollars we had to call the credit card company, read them the card number and receive an authorization number for the sale. It was a slow tedious process. It was common at the time for stores to have one or more Cash Only lanes so that cash customers didn’t have to wait for credit cards to be processed.
Some other chains were using bar code at the time. It was not common though.
@@tomewatson interesting i didn't know they used punched card tickets at some point .
@@belstar1128 more info on punch card tickets here en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimball_tag
Yey, a new video.
I remember seeing punchcard tags at Marshall Fields. My curious paws may have removed a few.
I'm really big on obscure and esoteric knowledge, but I didn't even know about Higbees playing a crucial role in the development of the POS systems of today. I did know that it features in A Christmas Story though. I feel like a bad Clevelander for this.
It's baffling that USA took so long to adopt chips in the credit cards. They are the default in Brazil for more than 20 years.
POS? But these computers seem pretty great!
I have to correct you about ENIAC. Although it is widely believed to be the first programmable electronic computer, it isn't. That was COLOSSUS. This was a computer built in WW2 by the British for codebreakiing. It was still classified when ENIAC was announced.