I’ve decided to create a new blog about my interest in Vintage Point of Sale Systems (electronic cash registers and the like) from the 1970s and 1980s.
If you’re so inclined, you can find it at The Vintage Point of Sale Site.
Might as well use this down time for geeky productivity.
I think Truman is getting bored with the subtle changes in our routine, even though we’re both home most of the time under normal circumstances. He knows something is different with the world but he can’t put his kitty paws on the details. Kibble and treats are happening on schedule but something tells his feline sixth sense that something is off.
To help cope with this situation he works on shredding the couch (I was tempted to call it a ‘davenport’) and climbing the screens on the windows to the balcony.
He needs a catcation, despite the innocent look displayed in the photo above.
I ventured into a local Jewel-Osco (supermarket) today. I had also stopped at Target beforehand. The Target was handling social distancing quite well. There was a “sanitized cart” corral at the front door with a young man wearing a mask wiping down carts as they came in to make available for customers. Arrows and other reminders dotted the floor everywhere you looked. All employees were wearing masks. The checkouts were mostly being handled by the self-serve lanes, where markings on the floor showed customers where to wait and when to proceed. An attendant sanitized each register after a customer was done with their purchase. People were friendly. The staff was helpful.
Back to the Jewel-Osco. Things weren’t quite as organized. About a third of the customers were wearing masks. About half the workers were wearing masks, not including the folks behind the deli. Signs on the floor reminded customers of social distancing using carts as a measurement and relegating aisles to one way traffic. About half the customers were minding the direction of travel. The busiest part of the store was the alcohol section. One entrance/exit was blocked off. Again, more signs on the floor of how to maintain your distance. Plastic overlays on the card transaction machines at the self-serve registers; Jewel-Osco still wants you to decide whether to donate to their latest charitable cause or not which defeats contactless payment with Apple Pay or Google Pay. Does anyone still use Samsung Pay?
This was my first time venturing into the general public in these circumstances and I must say I don’t have a lot of faith that we’ll be approaching anything akin to “normal” even by Labor Day. I know beaches are opening in Florida and there are protestors wanting to apparently lick each other in public. For the most part the length of the effects of this pandemic will be determined by the lowest common denominators of the country. Rushing through social distancing practices will just make the social distancing practices last longer.
Maybe this is what the masses want. I don’t have an answer and I don’t know what passes as societal thinking these days. Things have been going crazy for pretty much the entire 21st century.
You’d like nearly 20 years in I wouldn’t be surprised by any of this.
One of the more depressing sights along my daily walk is the Day Care Center down the street. Even though it’s mid-April they still have their St. Patrick’s Day decorations up because no one is going to the Day Care Center. We’re all locked in and locked up trying to beat this virus while Trump encourages people to protest in the streets.
The nearby elementary school marquee talks about a “Patriot’s Day Dance” on March 30th but I’m positive that never happened. All the blinds have been closed, all the shades have been drawn, all the lights have been turned off in that elementary school. Today Governor Pritzker announced Illinois schools would be closed through the end of the school year.
I wonder if the Day Care Center will be taking down their St. Patrick’s Day decorations to put up pumpkins later this year.
I’m nothing special and there’s nothing unique about our situation; I’m sure like millions of other Americans we’re just as tired of sitting at home as they are. People liken these times to World War II when Americans went to war, built things for the troops, and rallied together. The comparison is like apples to oranges; we don’t have any sort of presidential leadership, there’s nothing to send troops to, and families left back at home during wartime could at least hug their neighbor.
We have to avoid our neighbors on the street.
I watched a man stand on his porch to don a scuba mask and snorkel. He was taking his garbage to the cans in the alley adjacent to his home. He would be passing by no other human being; the elaborate getup was absolutely unnecessary.
People are scared.
I get wearing masks when you’re out in public and mingling with other people, that makes sense for the most part, I have noticed that some folks wearing masks relax social distancing protocol because they think the makes them invincible. A little bit of brain power and research will prove this is not true, but there’s not a lot of that in American society. I saw a meme this morning:
“What borders on stupidity?”
“Canada and Mexico”.
It’s a very sad commentary on a very real problem this country faces.
I hope the kids are able to put up Independence Day decorations this summer. This gives me hope.
This is a 1983 press photo taken in a Kmart. I don’t know the location of the Kmart, though I can tell you this is one location I had never been in. It would appear the photographer is standing on the checkstand for register #1. I’m surprised to see both registers two and six are designated as express checkouts.
The cashiers are using NCR 255 cash registers, which I’ve never seen in a Kmart. As a vintage technology buff I can tell you the NCR 255 was capable of scanning as early as the mid 1970s, but Kmart really struggled with bringing their store systems into the electronic era. Notice there’s no scanners in the checkstands and the cashier doesn’t have a wired wand anywhere. Undoubtedly the cashier was entering a price and selecting “Key 1”, “Key 2”, etc., as that was the way Kmart designated their departments at the time. Announcements over the PA system would refer to personnel as “Clock” and a number, you had to listen for your “clock” number to know when to respond.
The NCR 255 cash registers were quite sophisticated compared to what I remember from that era at Kmart; the Kmart in Mattydale kept their mechanical cash registers well into the 80s and the Kmart at “Western Lights” in Syracuse had loud NCR 225s that made a lot of banging sounds. Another Kmart near where I went to college had something completely different that wasn’t made by NCR at all.
I have a lot of useless information in my brain.
One thing I found surprising is the stacks of cartons of cigarettes along the express checkout. I had completely forgotten that was a thing back in the day, though now that I think about it I remember the grocery stores in my hometown having a similar arrangement at the registers.
I took a look at the visitor stats for this site for the first time in a very long while; most people come here to visit a page I wrote years ago about the department store chain “W.T. Grants”. Many former employees stop by to reminisce. Other visitors stop by to read about my memories of early computers and cash registers.
I really do enjoy vintage technology. I was doing research on NCR’s minicomputers of the 1970s when I came across this photo via a Google search. Kmart had a huge mish-mash of registers across their stores in the early 1980s until they finally settled down onto one somewhat cohesive system around the same time they ditched the big red “K” with the turquoise “mart”.
That Kmart sign is much bigger than any “Big K” sign I’ve ever seen since that unfortunate switch a couple of decades ago.
Now there’s hardly an Kmarts left in the country. Times are certainly different.
So we got a little bit of snow last night. It is not surprising the get some snow in the middle of April in Chicago, Illinois. In previous years snow at this time of the year would be disheartening but with everyone sheltering in place and not really going out to begin with, last night’s flurries didn’t really seem to have that much of an impact.
The streets were extra quiet this morning during the daily walk I use to start the day. I listened to a podcast from the folks at Relay FM. I like their selection of podcasts. Today I listened to “Focused”, which helped me get my brain back where it needed to be during these pandemic times.
I’m writing this blog entry during my lunch break and the snow on the balcony has already given way to the meager amounts of sunshine poking through the clouds. It is spring. We are moving toward more moments of sunshine.
We will be just fine.
I had a small epiphany this morning during my morning walk. During this COVID-19 crisis that has gripped the planet for the past couple of months, I have done my best to keep abreast of what’s going on in the news. Follow the news outlets during this crisis, coupled with the ramped political unevenness we’ve been riding for the past several years, is like getting bludgeoned with a sledgehammer on a daily basis.
Honestly, my time and mental health are worth much more than I have allowed them to be.
I freely admit that I’m not a fan of a Trump (to put it mildly). The guy has been an asshole since entering the public eye way back in the 80s. He was an asshole, he is an asshole, and he will always be an asshole. The mere sound of his voice makes me want to punt our very large television off the balcony.
So why the hell am I subjecting myself to news about him or from him? He rarely adds anything constructive to the national dialog. He is constantly boasting and bending the truth and being prideful. I can’t understand how his followers can tolerate his incessant pridefulness. My attempts to rationalize his behavior to ultimately filter out some news about the pandemic have been futile. And more startling, my rationalization has been a huge distraction to my way of life.
We’re going to get through this just fine, with or without Trump. There is very little about my life that is going to change whether or not I hang on every word belched out by the news media. I don’t need to know the minutia of Trump said this or Pelosi said that for my life to continue.
I don’t need the distractions. My mental health can’t take the distractions. So I’m allowing myself a quick summary of the daily news twice a day and then I’m going to focus on my family, my friends, and my work.
Twitter is also a big contributor to the decline of civil discourse in this country. My problem with Twitter is that I also have a lot of aviation and other geek friends on there and it’s an outlet for me since I can’t get to an airport and hang out with other pilots right now. So I’ve eschewed the official Twitter app (again) and turned off all notifications. Twitter is not worth the time sink. Like the news, I’ll periodically scan and contribute but under no circumstances will I go down the tweeted replies rabbit holes. They’re an endless pit of despair.
I’ve been feeling a little more uneven this week when compared to the past couple of weeks during these uneven times. I feel like more weight is building on all our shoulders. It’s time to shake off what we can, tune out the unproductive noise, and stand up straight again.
I’ll be better off for it.
I’m not getting much sleep these days. A couple people have commented, “you look tired”. I am tired. The past month has been especially exhausting but the past three (and some change) years have been nearly as exhausting.
I’m hoping I’ll sleep tonight. There’s really nothing else to do.
My grandmother handled the posting of Accounts Receivables for the family business. It was a part time position and she generally worked from 10 to 2. She’d bring dessert for everyone to enjoy during the lunch hour. She liked baking things.
Grandma posted to the customer ledgers using a mechanical NCR 160 Posting Machine from the early 1970s. I found the machine to be a marvel, with its typewriter like carriage, flap the flipped open for the ledger card, and rows and rows of specialized buttons. I’d watch her work while she did the posting and most of my accounting knowledge was learned by simply watching her work.
After she retired in 1986 I took over the Accounts Receivable duties for a little while before my aunt took over the position. A couple of years later I wrote a computer program to replace the NCR 160 Posting Machine. We used the same ledger cards and statements for customers but the computer remembered everyone’s address and balances and the like and could automatically print these things for the new month. Grandma would type everyone’s address on their monthly statement after the previous statement went out. She had an electric typewriter but she didn’t want one with a ‘return’ key; it had a manual lever to return the carriage as if it was completely manual typewriter. My aunt replaced the typewriter not long after joining the family business.
Even though I’m an electronics geek I am still fascinated by all the things were able to accomplish in the mid 20th century with these mechanical marvels. The Posting Machine knew when to add, subtract, stamp the date, and print a balance without telling the machine what to do. It was all programmed on a specialized bar that ran the length of the carriage. It’s pretty amazing if you think about it. It’s kind of like those old mechanical cash registers at Kmart that kept track of daily totals for every department for a readout at the end of the day.
We did some amazing things with machinery before we went all electronic. Our gadgets lasted longer too.
Just a guy with a husband. We’ve been together 28 years and he still makes me see fireworks on a daily basis. Hiker. Storm Chaser. Private Pilot. Tech Guy. Hackerish.
Weird? Eccentric!
