When talking about cash registers, we often imagine that calculator that has a drawer underneath that we see in supermarkets. It is not often that technologies like this change the way business is managed nowadays.

The earliest form of mechanical calculators dates back to the seventeenth century, and the abacus, the forerunner to the modern calculators, dates back all the way to the time of the Egyptians. In 1883, James Ritty invented the very first mechanical cash register. This is what you may have seen somewhere in old stores in the back roads or rural areas or towns.

The cash register has been at the forefront of business management ever since and with the addition of the paper tape to the original design, tracking of sales in those times were made easier. But ever since the 1980’s, the cash register has been seen with a whole lot of improvements to how it functions. For one thing, electronic cash registers were beginning to see prominence in most stores, and it is starting to replace the venerable mechanical cash register of the old.

By the 1990’s, there has been a new revolution with cash register design and implementation. More powerful computers made it possible to design electronic cash registers with more features and expanded connectivity. But still, there is one feature that has not gone through change, and this is the way sales are counted. Even though electronic cash registers are more powerful, they still cannot automatically count the sales or the inventory or the stock levels, and humans still has to do the manual counting for it.

When the first true integrated POS or Point of Sales System was invented, it heralded the new generation of smart systems that can not only record the sales on the cash registers, it can also tie all inventory systems together using one system to give you the one big picture at any time you need to see it.

Being a true computer by itself, a POS system can be directly compared to your home computer a few years back. The only differences would be that the POS was designed to run POS software 24 hours a day, lower power consumption and different internal design of its electronic systems.

The biggest addition to most POS systems being manufactured right now is the use of a POS software that can be installed in any of these POS systems. The POS software is just like any program you may write if you were a software designer. A lot of POS software makers also create their programs from one of a number of software programming packages or programming languages.

The nice thing about the Touch POS hardware today is that they use a standard set of commands that they follow, due in part to them being a true computer and following the set standards for all the computers being made today.
With these standard commands, a software maker only has to use his imagination to allow these commands to be used intuitively by the user when working on the POS system. This allows for easier training and faster transactions eventually.

Author's Bio: 

A Touch POS system could save your business.