Which POS software was this?

April 28, 2016 3:12 PM

I bought some things at a privately-owned grocery store today and the point-of-sale (POS) software display that showed how much I owed was a stunningly beautiful work of MS-DOS-style ANSI design. At the top of the screen it said "ERD POS" or something like that. The digits for the cost total were even bigger and fancier than this, but that image captures the general era. What was it? And how old is it? Thanks!
posted by circular to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Best answer: fwiw you can make interfaces like that today using the ncurses library (i don't know of any pos software that is built that way, but it's used, for example, as a way to have "gui" configuration for linux via a terminal).
posted by andrewcooke at 5:55 PM on April 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I used to program in Clipper which could certainly be used to create a program like that. As could FoxPro, DB II, and others. For me, that era ended about 1995.

My local oil change place used a system like that at least until 2010.
posted by SemiSalt at 5:24 AM on April 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I did POS support for IBM in the late 90s and early 2000s and even with common hardware pretty much every org had their own software.
posted by furtive at 4:50 PM on April 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks everybody! Fascinating that this might be in-house. I might ask if I get an opportunity next time I'm over there.
posted by circular at 3:50 PM on May 2, 2016