Contemplating the 80186 (Was: Open questions in OS design)

[jal]

Wow, that they still had that stuff

It's an embedded chip, you'll be suprised how much old muck you can find in embedded appliances. To be very specific, this is a chip from an FT-77 TEC cash register, dating from the early nineties, but to this date still used by a number of stores of the Super de Boer brand (for those living in the Netherlands). Each POS system also has a Z80 to handle the proprietary communication bus, but that one is soldered on, so I couldn't safe it, unfortunately.


JAL

[jal]

Holy sh!t! Gimme gimme gimme

I promise that if I see another one lying around I'll get one for you :)).


JAL

[Candy]

Wow, that they still had that stuff

It's an embedded chip, you'll be suprised how much old muck you can find in embedded appliances. To be very specific, this is a chip from an FT-77 TEC cash register, dating from the early nineties, but to this date still used by a number of stores of the Super de Boer brand (for those living in the Netherlands). Each POS system also has a Z80 to handle the proprietary communication bus, but that one is soldered on, so I couldn't safe it, unfortunately.


JAL

You sure you don't mean Jumbo or something? Super de Boer is expensive-ish and I didn't expect their registers to be 20+ years old... In what city? I'm fairly sure the Enschede branch didn't back in '03...

[jal]

You sure you don't mean Jumbo or something? Super de Boer is expensive-ish and I didn't expect their registers to be 20+ years old... In what city? I'm fairly sure the Enschede branch didn't back in '03...

Don't forget the whole Konmar debacle that cost Laurus tens of millions of bucks, and eventually lead to its downfall. Super de Boer is currently replacing its cash registers, but at least until recently there were still a number of them with the old POSes. The pricing position of a store says very little about its profitability, nor of the modernness level of their hardware. Jumbo is switching this year to POSes provided by Toshiba TEC, I'm not sure what they have currently, but I am certain it's not old TEC stuff.

To check if a Super de Boer has FT-77s is easy: look for the green 2-line displays for both cashier and customer, saying TEC on it somewhere.


JAL

[earlz]

I'm impressed by how low-tech a lot of places still are..

I consider ms-dos obsolete, now way around it. Well, whenever a register starts up at my mcdonalds(and I believe every mcdonalds at the moment, as they have a fairly consistent interface) it greets you with a BIOS screen saying it has like 256MB ram and a 2Ghz celeron processor.. etc etc(diskless, PXE boot) but then it will say "starting ms-dos" which then starts the register program and such...

That completely baffles me.. Why would they use MS-DOS!? even for a register... Of course, I think they are using it more as a boot-loader, but the register program does run in 16-bit mode! cause I once caused it to somehow messup by printing too many receipts(I got bored lol) and I was greeted with "General protection fault AX=... BX=... SP=.." so it was either real-mode(does that support GPF exception?) or 16-bit protected mode...
It seems more to me though that they use MS-DOS as a bootloader..

But then the other baffling thing.. the managers work on a thing called either hte POS or ISP.. I can't remember which.. and it runs windows 98! like, the managers are stuck using that crappy operating system if they ever need to do something like type a document and print it off or even browse the internet..

It makes no sense to me why they would spend money maintaining such a obsolete system.. anyway.. my rant of the day.. lol

[Firestryke31]

My guess as to why they spend money maintaining an obsolete system like that is because it works now, and therefore there's no reason to spend a bunch of money to completely rewrite it to use updated "features". Think of it this way: Spend $0 for a system that you know works and can use right now, or spend $200,000 on a system that might work and will take months or even years before it can be used. And if you say "I can throw something better together in an hour" then tell me, will it meet all of the legal requirements for financial transactions in all of the countries it might be used in?

But yeah, I think it might be amusing to put together something using that 80186, but I have no experience with that kind of thing...

[jal]

I consider ms-dos obsolete, now way around it.

The biggest retailer in the Netherlands, Albert Heijn, still runs mostly DOS powered POSes. Why? Because the hardware is old in some stores: 486es were still present a few years ago (maybe even still), and P1s are most of them. Remember it's mostly specialized hardware (many extension ports for customer display, drawer, printer, special keyboard, LCD screen etc.) and quite expensive (used to cost about 500 euro at least per POS), and the stuff runs for at least 10 years. You'd be crazy to replace that every two years (you'd go bankrupt for sure). Only very recently they ported the POS system to Linux, using a software API emulator so still the same software runs on all systems.

That completely baffles me.. Why would they use MS-DOS!? even for a register...

As I stated above, they use it because a) the system is probably very old and b) it works.

It makes no sense to me why they would spend money maintaining such a obsolete system.. anyway.. my rant of the day.. lol

Maintaining an 'obsolete' system is far cheaper than building a new one + maintaining that.


JAL

[Troy Martin]

But yeah, I think it might be amusing to put together something using that 80186, but I have no experience with that kind of thing...

I'll get started!