The Fascinating History of Point-of-Sale Computers
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 ก.พ. 2025
- This video covers the amazing history of POS (Point Of Sale) computers, from the first mechanical cash registers to AI-powered shopping carts called smart carts. These innovative computer 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 TH-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 TH-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!
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.
"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!
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.
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.
This channel is hugely underrated! There are hidden gems in other videos on this channel, like interview with Sierra on-line founders
That was really interesting, you don't see a lot of talk about POS systems. Glad to see a new video from you!
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 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.
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.
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.
Who would have thought...simply magnificent production...wow...beautiful presentation...and obviously impeccable research ...thank you
Fascinating video! It’s great to see you back on TH-cam!
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!
good to see you man!
Boy! What a great video. Tremendous amount of information! Thanks a lot.
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
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.
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!
Holy balls this is a great video. Already shared it with my friends, liked and subscribed.
That was great. Value content right here... Well researched, well written, and well delivered - by an actual person! Keep it up.
Fabulous video. Great stuff and very interesting.
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.
I love the work you've done here. I share your fondness for retro computing, especially vintage point of sale equipment.
Came expecting a whimsical look back at the worst computers to exist, but yet still leaving satisfied. Excellent video!
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. :)
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.
This video was incredibly informative and entertaining! Thank you for the work you put into this!
I lot of people had their early working years in retail and at that time their life basically revolved around the POS machine.
Excellent, simply excellent
OMG the venerable DTS 400! I used that thing for YEARS 🍔🍟🥤
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.
Fantastic effort 🎉
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.
I tell you what. This is an excellent documentary. Keep making more.
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!
Thanks. I am a technology history buff. This was fascinating.
Wow, lots of interesting info in this. Welcome back!
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.
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.
Well done. Certainly earned a subscription from me.
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.
Great video !
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.
@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.
THE RETURN OF THE KING!
Great video! I wish you could tell more about the POS software, and how it works
That was brilliant, thank you.
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.
Really good and interesting video! Keep making stuff like this pls
This is awesome! Well researched. Keep up the good work!
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.
Been craving a vid like this for awhile!
@5:40
"While I smoke, hand me those paper slips"
outstanding!
JCPenney had OCR guns with lights that scanned a special OCR font on those NCR systems.
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 well done.
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.
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).
The tote system I find to be every bit as impressive as as anything since. Just a massive amount of moving parts wires
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.
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
The same companies and names of great minds keep popping up in these stories
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.
Very interesting video!
I just finished writing an article about Peddle and I wish I had seen this first.
Interesting.
Hes back!!!!
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'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.
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 🤣
Funny how it goes from good to bad to good. When some of the first cloud based POS systems showed up. If your internet went down. They had no backup. Then for those in the industry if you had a IPAD with the app. You had to repair the blue tooth printer and card reader all the time. Then again part of that is based on price. If you get what I call a more traditional POS. It includes a computer, and everything or say a master terminal. So if you loose internet connection. You could still work. Funny how that goes around. Oh and thanks for filling in something I didn't know I had a question about. I know about that GNU POS software. I didn't realize of forgot it was a true pos software. I know tons of generic POS machines come with free pos software and that is it.
This was unexpected.
POS? But these computers seem pretty great!
Great video. I would invest in a better microphone.
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.
OMG I JUST ASSUMED THE THUMBNAIL WAS FOR A COMPUTER HISTORY ARCHIVES VIDEO BUT IT'S YOU
I remember seeing punchcard tags at Marshall Fields. My curious paws may have removed a few.
Yey, a new video.
I would have loved to have watched this, but for some inexplicable reason there was a thumping soundtrack behind the interesting voiceover. Were it to be republished without that soundtrack I'd watch it.
Me knowing exactly what POS means: "The fascinating history of Piece of Shit computers."
I've had many POS computers but only a few good ones.
12:52 imagine working at Hobby Lobby..
ehh i've never seen your channel before but i'll bite, this is interesting and isnt full of ai generated garbage lol
Great insight, but completely glossed over the advancements made in the late 80's and 90's and absolute domination from IBM in this space from the IBM 3151 terminals, 4694 POS controllers, token-ring dominance.
94 cents in 1974 is about 6 dollars now if you use the inflation calculator.
Now there's 3 guaranteed things in life, death, taxes, and TH-camrs forgetting about the most powerful and influential, albeit proprietary, pos and inventory system ever made, Triad Computer Systems. Don't worry, it's often overlooked, but they were responsible for the operation of most inventory systems throughout the US in almost every sector for most of the 80s and early 90s. Mostly used as an inventory database for multi location businesses, they also operated as a fully integrated pos.
I remember Triad point of sale systems being very prevalent in the lumber and hardware store outlets in the early-mid 1980s
@thatjpwing they were very diverse, they had automotive, hardlines, lumber, and wholesale divisions. My dad was a traveling repair technician for them throughout the 80s and 90s and it's the reason I got into technology and have such an appreciation for it's history today.
The barcode was actually invented within the railroad industry!
Oh, Point Of Sale computers! I thought POS stood for something else. 😉
This video was NOT a POS 😂Sorry, had to make that joke but great video with cool research!
I am so disappointed with the end of Postal POS segment. in 2012 USPS awarded POS contract to Escher Group and the company modernised existing Retail Sail System (RSS) on NCR hardware to its own product. On 31:41 you can see a screenshot of it. And no, USPS offices are not running old Windows OS. Everything on Win10 since 2019
Otherwise good video, but I can't fact check the rest of it
POS disambiguation...
Okay, who looked at the thumbnail and assumed "POS" stood for something else?😐
112$ was cute
13:06 - how fitting, that a conspiracy theorist is named Tucker :-)
That's a very unfortunate title card lol