Did you know that Retail Point of Sale systems go way back to 1870’s? It all started when James Ritty, an owner of a saloon in Dayton, Ohio got sick of losing sales due to having dishonest employees who often steal his profits. So while on a trip to Europe, Ritty` saw a mechanical device on the ship’s propeller that tracked the number of revolutions for maintenance purposes and applied the same concept by creating a cash register that would record all the cash transactions in his saloon. He and his brother worked on this idea and in 1879, the brothers patented their invention as “Ritty’s Incorruptible Cashier”.
The brothers manufactured their cash registers in a small factory in Dayton and several years later, Jacob H. Eckert of Cincinnati bought the business from the Ritty’s. He formed the National Manufacturing Company in 1881 and later sold it to John H. Patterson who continued to improve the cash register by including rolls of paper that serves as a record for the day’s transactions as well as a receipt.
In 1906, the first electronic cash register was invented by Charles F. Kettering of the National Manufacturing Company.
Several years later, more and more companies launched improved cash registers. August of 1973 where IBM introduced the first commercial use of client-server technology, P2P (peer to peer) communications, LAN (Local Area Network) simultaneous backup, and remote initialization through IBM3650 and IBM3660 Store Systems which could control 128 IBM 3653/3663 Point Of Sale Registers.
In 1979, Gene Mosher, the owner of Old Canal Café in Syracuse, New York created a POS software that ran on an Apple II, to take his customer’s orders by the entrance of the restaurant and print complete preparation details in the restaurant’s kitchen. After giving their orders, customers would just proceed to their tables and find their food waiting for them. Then in 1986, Mosher created the first graphical touch-screen POS software by using the Atari ST and bundled NeoChrome.
Seeing the need for a standard computerized POS system that would simplify the interconnection between POS devices, UnifiedPOS led by The National Retail Foundation created an initiative to combine two existing device interface standards under one specification to allow retailers freedom of choice in the selections of POS devices. And in 1996, Microsoft, NCR Corporation, Epson and Fujitsu-ICL created the first commonly-adopted standard point of sale system named OPOS (OLE for POS) and the following year, Sun Microsystems, IBM and NCR Corporation developed JavaPOS which was released in1999, both of which conforms to UnifiedPOS’s standard.
The Point of Sale systems that we are now using is way advance compared to the ones from the past. Who would’ve thought that we would be able to develop a Point of Sale system that would be able to cater to specific industries, business sizes and utilize a variety of operating systems, hardware requirements and much more? With the advancement of technology, human creativity and innovation, a day would surely come when people would develop a Point of Sale system that would surpass the POS systems we are currently using, and make a new one that is way beyond our imagination.
article prepared by Beige@LivePOS
The brothers manufactured their cash registers in a small factory in Dayton and several years later, Jacob H. Eckert of Cincinnati bought the business from the Ritty’s. He formed the National Manufacturing Company in 1881 and later sold it to John H. Patterson who continued to improve the cash register by including rolls of paper that serves as a record for the day’s transactions as well as a receipt.
In 1906, the first electronic cash register was invented by Charles F. Kettering of the National Manufacturing Company.
Several years later, more and more companies launched improved cash registers. August of 1973 where IBM introduced the first commercial use of client-server technology, P2P (peer to peer) communications, LAN (Local Area Network) simultaneous backup, and remote initialization through IBM3650 and IBM3660 Store Systems which could control 128 IBM 3653/3663 Point Of Sale Registers.
In 1979, Gene Mosher, the owner of Old Canal Café in Syracuse, New York created a POS software that ran on an Apple II, to take his customer’s orders by the entrance of the restaurant and print complete preparation details in the restaurant’s kitchen. After giving their orders, customers would just proceed to their tables and find their food waiting for them. Then in 1986, Mosher created the first graphical touch-screen POS software by using the Atari ST and bundled NeoChrome.
Seeing the need for a standard computerized POS system that would simplify the interconnection between POS devices, UnifiedPOS led by The National Retail Foundation created an initiative to combine two existing device interface standards under one specification to allow retailers freedom of choice in the selections of POS devices. And in 1996, Microsoft, NCR Corporation, Epson and Fujitsu-ICL created the first commonly-adopted standard point of sale system named OPOS (OLE for POS) and the following year, Sun Microsystems, IBM and NCR Corporation developed JavaPOS which was released in1999, both of which conforms to UnifiedPOS’s standard.
The Point of Sale systems that we are now using is way advance compared to the ones from the past. Who would’ve thought that we would be able to develop a Point of Sale system that would be able to cater to specific industries, business sizes and utilize a variety of operating systems, hardware requirements and much more? With the advancement of technology, human creativity and innovation, a day would surely come when people would develop a Point of Sale system that would surpass the POS systems we are currently using, and make a new one that is way beyond our imagination.
article prepared by Beige@LivePOS
Great article! Thank you for writing it.
ReplyDeleteI will point all of our customers that are interested in POS software and POS systems to read this article first as a "must read" material.
Thank you,
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