Point of Sale Programs - From Cash Registers to Modern POS Software

Point of Sale Programs - From Cash Registers to Modern POS Software

The "point of sale" (POS), or "checkout" as it is more commonly known as, refers to the location where a transaction is made. The first known point of sale program was developed by IBM in 1973 and made use of electronic cash registers (ECR). The system utilized relatively new technologies at the time such as client-server and peer to peer communications, Local Area Networks (LAN) for simultaneous backups and remote initialization. A year after it was developed, it was already of great use to retail stores around the United States.

In 1979, another POS program was developed, this time by Gene Mosher, which he used in his restaurant business. His creative software ran on an Apple II computer and was programmed to receive customer orders at the restaurant's entrance, and a copy with full details would be printed inside the kitchen. This way, customers received their food at their tables much faster than any other restaurant. Mosher also developed the first graphical touch screen point of sale program in 1986 using an Atari ST computer and the Neochrome bitmap graphics editor.

In the post-1990s, the development of multi-functional POS programs went hand-in-hand with the development of local processing power, local storage data, networking, and the graphical user interface. Various POS programs were also developed for operating systems such as Windows and Unix.

For the past two decades, vendors and retailers alike have been working on hardware interface standardization of the developing point of sale programs, aiming also to simplify interconnection of multiple POS devices (hardware and software). Standardizations such as OPOS for Windows and JavaPOS for Java are some of the products of this initiative. OPOS, which stands for OLE (object linking and embedding) for POS, was the first globally-accepted standard and was a product of the joint efforts of Microsoft, NCR Corporation, Epson, and Fujitsu-ICL. JavaPOS was developed by Sun Microsystems, IBM, and NCR Corporation. These two developments aimed to make the modern point of sale programs and point of sale hardware platform independent.

The unfolding of the new millennium gave way to the most advanced development of POS software yet. As a result, modern point of sale programs are all expected to have fast and consistent speed, they should be reliable and easy to use, with multi-functionality, remote supportability, and can be bought at a much lower cost than ever before.

Point of sale programs have come a long way since the development of electronic cash registers. Today, retailers can enjoy the benefits of point of sale programs as a way of making business transactions easier, faster, and free from unavoidable human errors. Most of all, point of sale programs are cost-efficient, and often produce the highest return on investment that a retail business owner could make into a technology solution.

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