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I've been trying to study the history of early electronic cash registers. A large part if this has been IBM's POS offerings over the years. Ultimately, I wanted to get a working 4690 based POS system up and running to experiment with. Anybody who has worked with the system or has any information on how/if a random enthusiast can get a system up and running. Here's some of what I have so far if you're curious: Only shortly after the release of the IBM PC and XT, IBM decided to create a PC based cash register system. They wrote their own operating system for this task. 4680. It's based on something called FlexOS, a multitasking disk operating system. Cool hardware:   It used a bunch of terminals attached to a central controller. The terminals are actually diskless PCs that load their OS from the controller. This OS would then run any of a number of point of sale applications. Into the 90's, 4680 was replaced by 4690, which is an evolution of the same system. This OS continues to be used today by many retailers, the biggest being WalMart. 4690 just keeps getting updated to support the modern times, software has been updated again and again, to support new things like touchscreens, gift cards, EMV, Realtime statistics, etc. So it's become this very bizarre anachronistic mix of technology. It'll happily run a sorta modern touch system, or it'll still run a simple keyboard and VFD setup with no monitor. It still has an 8 character limit on filenames ffs.  I think the thought of a major system that runs an OS that isn't Windows, Linux, or Unix in 2016 to be kinda nuts and awesome. Also the way 4690 is so well integrated with all the hardware is really neat. I even have a working terminal, but there's no software to go with. I made a video about it a while ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSC1sLKLYMM I've plumbed the internet for almost all the available information. Believe me, there isn't much. Unfortunately, Toshiba has locked almost all the publications behind a secure site, so there isn't much to go on. I think this is kinda an important part of computer history and someone should try and preserve info about it. I'm sure there's someone who has worked with this professionally, I'd love to know more about this system.
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Feb 7, 2016 10:12
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That actually has some publications that aren't available from IBM/Toshiba anymore, very cool, thanks!
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Feb 7, 2016 23:53
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Aunt Beth posted:I've worked with 4690 before. What are your goals with getting a test system up and running? It's really just a bone-simple DOS interface on the backend to support the diskless boot of the terminals and then handle sales data. I would hope to get my hands on one of the sales programs IBM wrote, like SurePOS ACE or the General sales application. But if I can't, I'm sure I could do something with just the OS, if I could boot terminals with it. Newer 4690 versions support VMWare as a controller, with that, I could boot my real register as a terminal.
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Feb 8, 2016 06:26
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Aunt Beth posted:Ah. Yeah that's really hard to come by. One of my customers works with a very highly modified version and it's nothing they could or would want to give away a copy of, even to a surely benign enthusiast. Understandable. I know a lot of companies customize the software at the source with all sorts of secrets. I'm still holding out hope that there is a clean copy out there. Michaeldim fucked around with this message at 06:46 on Feb 11, 2016 |
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Feb 10, 2016 00:44
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