Zayre Electronics is the name of my home-based PC building and repair business from the late 1990s. I had a couple of contracts during that time and was able to make a little cash with the venture before deciding it was ultimately not profitable and winding it down. It was a little side hustle that offered me growth in my IT skills more than anything else. I’m happy to have that as part of my past.
I’ve enjoyed tinkering with computers since the mid 1980s. I was fascinated with the assortment of Apple ][+ and Apple //e computers in the “computer lab”, which was actually a converted class room in the math department. The math teachers taught computer education back then. Shortly after I graduated high school in 1986 the business department took over the responsibilities. I don’t know what year they finally ditched the IBM Selectrics, I was long gone.
I have a fully functional NCR RealPOS cash register setup here at the house. I don’t have a cash drawer hooked up to the system, as I don’t have that much cash to put in the drawer, but the rest of the system allows me to mess around with various point of sale software program suites and related software offerings. There’s a whole community of us point of sale geeks and we talk about they way things used to be and the way things will be in the point of sale systems space. Sorry to say, self checkouts are here to stay and that saddens us all.
I fire the register up from time to time and work on the software package I’m writing to keep these older machines running beyond their ill-timed shelf life. There are many things one can do with old technology, nothing is really obsolete unless it’s given up the ghost completely. I’ve turned old telephone system terminals into file servers with a few modifications to the operating system.
There’s always options.
