Occasionally I will have some sort of dream that hearkens back to the 1970s and 1980s when I was absolutely fascinated by the computerized systems appearing in the retail environments. Last night I dreamed about such a system in a grocery store. Musing about the dream this evening, I ran across this video online describing how cutting-edge technology would soon enable a cashier to pull funds from your bank account and automatically transfer it to the store’s account. My, how far we’ve come in 40 years.
This video is quite short but I found it to be very fascinating. How I loved the days of “legacy computing”. In case you’re wondering, the cash registers in questions are NCR 255s. Quite expensive at the time, I can vividly remember these at a local IGA Market near my grandmother’s house. When I worked at Hills in 1990, I briefly used these before they were removed and new IBM cash registers were put in their place.
