Chronological development of POS systems

Historically, point of sales systems had their roots in 1870’s in Dayton, Ohio. The business of James Ritty named as “Dealer of pure whiskies, fine wines and cigars” was successful. But, like every other business in that period, this entrepreneur was faced with raising issue related with dishonest employees. The employees’ fraud the money received from the customers instead of depositing them.

 

When James Ritty was on the steamboat trip to Europe, he was intrigued by wok of mechanical device on the ship propeller that counts the number of revolutions for maintenance purposes. Once he came home to Dayton, James and his brother started to develop their idea to duplicate the mechanism and to design it in way to count cash transactions at the saloon. In 1879, James and his brother patented their invention as “Ritty’s incorruptible cashier”, nowadays well known as cash register.

 

Afterwards, Ritty brothers opened a factory for manufacturing these cashiers. Jacob Eckert bought the business from Ritty’s in 1881, and named it as “National manufacturing company”. Later, he sold the business to John Patterson who continues making improvements and he applied paper roll to the cash register for recording the day transactions.
In the next years, the cash registers continued to be improved, and in 1970’s the first computer driven cash register were introduced.

 

In the 1980’s the retail software based on PC technology started to make its way into mainstream retail entrepreneurship.
Nowadays, POS systems are based on advanced technology, they are more secure and they could provide useful information by allowing the user to operate in functional integrated system.