Retail point of sale machines have existed in an early version of their digital form since the early 1970s, when IBM offered networked cash registers to a few major retailers in the United States. Of course, at that time the networked cash registers had basically no autonomous functions at all, let alone the capacity to process payment on credit or even print receipts. The history of how modern
POS terminals developed from the oldest machinated cash registers and were integrated into merchants’ storefronts is a tale of eliminating waste in increasing efficiency that would make sense to any small-business owner today.
The first retail point of sale machines were cash registers developed in the 1870s to keep track of monetary transactions in an effort to prevent employees from pocketing payment for goods. Fifteen years later, the same machines had been developed and improved to use paper rolls to print merchant and customer copies of receipts. The next big revelation came with the computer revolution of the late 20th Century, when networked “computers” installed in cash registers and connected to a mainframe computer to control the POS terminals and print out information about transactions. These machines did facilitate the accepting and processing of payment as well as bookkeeping.
McDonald’s Restaurant played an important role in pushing this development further by hiring the creation a POS network that had a specific button for each item on the menu, dramatically increasing how quickly they could process orders accurately. Fast forward 20 years to the boom of credit cards across the United States and Canada, and the same goal defined the development of electronic retail point of sale machines that included peripheral credit card readers. Just as there was incentive to cut down on human error in 1870 and 1970, by eliminating the carbon-paper imprinter, POS terminal designers increased payment processing efficiency and decreased opportunities for workers to make mistakes or steal.