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POS
Restaurant Systems
are used in restaurants, hotels, stadiums, and casinos, as
well as almost any type of retail establishment.
POS
Restaurant Systems
(Point of Sale) can mean a retail shop, a checkout counter
in a shop, or the location where a transaction occurs.
More specifically, point of sale often refers to the
hardware and software used for checkouts -- the equivalent
of an electronic cash register.
POS
Restaurant Systems
Technology
POS
Restaurant Systems
evolved from the mechanical cash registers of the first
half of the 20th century. Examples included the NCR
registers, operated by a crank, and the lever-operated
Burroughs registers. These cash registers recorded data on
journal tapes or paper tape and required an extra step to
transcribe the information into the retailer's accounting
system.
Most
retail
POS
Restaurant Systems do much more than just "point of sale" tasks. Even for smaller tier 4
& 5 retailers, many
POS
Restaurant Systems
can include fully integrated accounting, inventory
management, open to buy forecasting, customer relation
management (CRM), service management, rental, and payroll
modules. Due to this wide range of functionality, vendors
sometimes refer to POS solutions as retail management
software or business management software.
POS
Restaurant Systems -
hardware interface standardization
Vendors
and retailers are working to standardize development of
computerized POS systems and simplify interconnecting POS
devices. Two such initiatives are OPOS and JavaPOS, both
of which conform to the UnifiedPOS standard led by The
National Retail Foundation.
OPOS,
short for OLE for POS, was the first commonly-adopted
standard and was created by Microsoft, NCR Corporation,
Epson and Fujitsu-ICL. OPOS is a COM-based interface
compatible with all COM-enabled programming languages for
Microsoft Windows. OPOS was first released in 1996.
JavaPOS was developed by Sun Microsystems, IBM, and NCR
Corporation in 1997 and first released in 1999. JavaPOS is
for Java what OPOS is for Windows, and thus largely
platform independent.
POS
communication command protocols
There
are several communication protocols POS systems use to
control peripherals. Among them are
*
EPSON Esc/POS
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UTC Standard
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UTC Enhanced
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AEDEX
*
ICD 2002
*
Ultimate
*
CD 5220
*
DSP-800
*
ADM 787/788.
There
are also nearly as many proprietary protocols as there are
companies making POS peripherals. EMAX, used by EMAX
International, was a combination of AEDEX and IBM dumb
terminal.
Most
POS peripherals, such as displays and printers, support
several of these command protocols in order to work with
many different brands of POS terminals and computers.
restaurant pos computer systems
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