The next department store chain to be featured here on the Vintage Point of Sale site will be Wal*Mart. Wal*Mart is a fascinating study in vintage electronic point of sale equipment, as they were leaders in going digital with their entire store operation.
In the photo you’ll see a couple of Data Terminal Systems cash registers, presumably Series 400 registers, to be exact. I’m looking for any information on Wal*Mart’s first run with electronic cash registers: documentation, receipts, anything.
If you have anything to share with the site I’ll be sure to give you credit!
I was the Home Depot and Wal-Mart DTS POS Account Manager in 1982/1986… toward the end of this time, we were acquired by National Semiconductor. I was 29 years old at the time. Shortly thereafter, I left DTS/NSC and went to work for ICL, then left ICL to work for Symbol Technologies. The POS business helped catapult my career in the bar code scanning business. It has been a great run. I am 70 years old now and still in the bar code business, working for Zebra Technologies.
I was the Home Depot and Wal-Mart DTS POS Account Manager in 1982/1986… toward the end of this time, we were acquired by National Semiconductor. I was 29 years old at the time. Shortly thereafter, I left DTS/NSC and went to work for ICL, then left ICL to work for Symbol Technologies. The POS business helped catapult my career in the bar code scanning business. It has been a great run. I am 70 years old now and still in the bar code business, working for Zebra Technologies.
When I was managing the Wal-Mart account for DTS/National Semiconductor, we were challenged by Wal-Mart to meet their need for a “Large File Controller” due to their commitment to doing bar code scanning on all merchandise… and they did not need to support just the maximum number of SKUs in any single store, but every store had to support ALL SKUs in all stores throughout their chain. And they needed redundancy with multiple store controllers with mirrored hard drives so they could have 24-7 operations… any time they need to shut down a controller for maintenance, they had to have a back up… Our store controllers were based upon the DEC PDP11, and it could not support a big enough item file to support all SKUS in all stores within every store controller… we lost the business to IBM. And that was pretty much the end of the POS business for DTS/Datachecker (subsidiary of National Seminconductor).