Before & How It Has Evolved

Are you looking toward the future of POS systems? POS originated from the original arithrometer in 1623. The arithrometer started as a mechanical calculator and grew into a bigger and more powerful device. In the late 1800s the arithrometer evolved into the first cash register. It was also at this time that the term, “ringing up a sale” came to light. Starting in the 1980s, IBM came out with Retail Store Solutions platform. That platform transformed the original cash register into diverse POS systems that became the backbone for controlling sales. Hardware from IBM’s Retail Store Solutions Platform has been used on a global level for the past 30 years. Their breakthrough led to the change of mechanical or analog solutions to what’s now, digital point of sale systems. Today, the cash register is now a central hub or point of sale system with more advanced security and capabilities to handle every aspect of a transaction.

The problems with past POS software were the Windows-based solutions that required a computer server with many features that needed cables attached to registers from Salesforce cloud. These systems would run very expensive and would cause headaches for merchants, especially when their servers would go down. Thanks to the technology advancements, POS systems amount to much more than the action of just a point of sale. Today, many systems also handle anything from sales and inventory management, to cloud storage and accounting reporting.