As I’m doing more research on how long the Singer-Friden MDTS 908 900/9021 registers were around, I found a couple of shots of the grand opening of Sears in Casper, Wyoming. The store opened in 1982 and it appears installed the MDTS system in the new store.
I know Sears moved from the Singer-Friden registers to NCR 2152s in the 1980s. I was thinking it was around this time, but it must have been a little later in the decade. Of the electronic systems used by Sears, the NCR 2152 must have been around the shortest time, because in late 1991 CompuAdd in Texas designed cash registers for the Sears contract.
So, the Singer system was around for more than a decade (most likely with upgrades in the backend), the NCR system probably barely made it a decade, the CompuAdd systems were around for 10 years and the IBM SurePOS registers from the early 2000s are still around in the few remaining stores.
1 See comments around Sears using the Singer 900/902 registers, not 908 as originally reported.
Two drawers?!? wow… now that’s fancy!
I worked for Singer Business Machines in the field as a tech and the moved to national technical support in on the MDTS POS System in Fairfield NJ. You refer to the 908 unit Sears used the 900 and the 902 POS units primarily. JC Penney used the 925 POS unit. I don’t remember the 908 being used that much. Singer used a 900/902 POS unit at their stores with a ISF individual store and forward tape unit that was polled nightly over a modem. The ISF unit was a suitcase size unit that was wall mounted. Numerous other retail stores used this MDTS/ISF configuration.Bill
Hello Bill,
Thanks for stopping by and the clarifications! I’ll be updating the entry shortly with the information.
Well I’ll be. I was digging around to see if Singer ever made video terminals, and ended up glancing through these articles, and I was not expecting to see my hometown Sears featured! Though by the time I was old enough to be paying attention, they definitely had replaced this stuff with CompuAdd.
Eastridge Mall (which opened in ’82 with this Sears) is even still around, sort of, hanging on by its fingernails, but Sears of course is long gone.
I worked as a Flexowriter and 5800 tech for Singer Business Machines 1972-1976 in San Francisco, eventually moving over to the San Leandro Office on Teagarden St.