Data was traditionally transmitted at the end of the day, but busier locations could schedule interval reports to the back office. All math operations were done locally at the register, the backend provided a credit authorization option and collected all the data from the terminal. The cash register terminal initiated all communication with the System Ten, communicating over a two-wire connected pair at 1200 baud. The back-end system supporting this register was the Singer System Ten. The numeric display showed only numbers operator guidance was provided through the buttons lighting up in sequence of the program. Developed in the late 1960s after Singer purchased Friden, these cash registers were typically found in Sears, JC Penney, and other department store chains. They’re in my “top five” of electronic point of sale system geekiness and probably one of the very first systems that caught my attention. Alas, I could not find a corresponding auction on eBay, because I would certainly go just about anywhere in the lower 48 states to pick up one of these cash registers. The find made my heart leap because while the photos were on, they indicated the source of the listing was eBay. While surfing around on the internet I found some newish photos of the Singer-Friden 908 Cash Register.
The technology “inspiration” photo that hangs in my office Posted in Singer-Friden Leave a comment Singer-Friden MDTS 908 Cash Register. (Casper Star-Tribune Collection, Casper College Western History Center) (Casper Star-Tribune Collection, Casper College Western History Center) Customers line up in the hardware department at Sears in Eastridge Mall during its grand opening in Oct. Customers line up at the registers during the grand opening of Sears in the Eastridge Mall in Oct. So, the Singer system was around for more than a decade (most likely with upgrades in the backend), the NCR system probably barely made it a decade, the CompuAdd systems were around for 10 years and the IBM SurePOS registers from the early 2000s are still around in the few remaining stores. Of the electronic systems used by Sears, the NCR 2152 must have been around the shortest time, because in late 1991 CompuAdd in Texas designed cash registers for the Sears contract. I was thinking it was around this time, but it must have been a little later in the decade. I know Sears moved from the Singer-Friden registers to NCR 2152s in the 1980s.
The store opened in 1982 and it appears installed the MDTS system in the new store. As I’m doing more research on how long the Singer-Friden MDTS 908 registers were around, I found a couple of shots of the grand opening of Sears in Casper, Wyoming.
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