Point of Sales

Point of sale (POS) or checkout is the place where a transaction occurs in exchange for goods or services. The point of sale often refers to the physical electronic cash register or dedicated POS hardware used for checkout, but the POS is simply the location where the sale is conducted, money changes hands and a receipt is given, which can also occur on a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or mobile POS device when the right hardware and POS software is combined with the mobile device.

For small and medium-sized retailers, the POS will be customized by retail industry as different industries have different needs. For example, a grocery or candy store will need a scale at the point of sale, while bars and restaurants will need to customize the item sold when a customer has a special meal or drink request. The modern point of sale will also include advanced functionalities to cater to different verticals, such as inventory, CRM, financials, warehousing, and so on, all built into the POS software. Prior to the modern POS, all of these functions were done independently and required the manual re-keying of information, which resulted in a lot of errors.

Software prior to the 1990s

McDonald's POS device by Brobeck

Early Electronic Cash Registers (ECR) were controlled with proprietary software and were very limited in function and communications capability. In August 1973 IBM announced the IBM 3650 and 3660 Store Systems that were, in essence, a mainframe computer used as a store controller that could control 128 IBM 3653/3663 point of sale registers. This system was the first commercial use of client-server technology, peer-to-peer communications, local area network (LAN) simultaneous backup, and remote initialization. By mid-1974, it was installed in Pathmark Stores in New Jersey and Dillard's Department Stores.

One of the first microprocessor-controlled cash register systems was built by William Brobeck and Associates in 1974, for McDonald's Restaurants.[1] It used...