Date: Wed, 01 Feb 1995 02:01:19 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org> To: Jeffrey Hsu <hsu@freefall.cdrom.com> Cc: hackers@freefall.cdrom.com Subject: Re: POS (was Re: sup: Ok, I'm gonna do it.) Message-ID: <17408.791632879@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 01 Feb 95 01:31:15 PST." <199502010931.BAA27914@freefall.cdrom.com>
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> Point of sales systems are a big part of SCO Unix sales and one of > the most common business applications. These POS packages are > usually custom-built vertical applications with the operating system > bundled in. Does anyone want to put one together for FreeBSD? I I don't really feel like putting one together myself (I've *done* POS systems; I cut my teeth on the damn things! I don't want to do them ever again! :-) but I strongly support the sentiment! I've long felt that 2 or 3 dedicated hackers could easily put a warehousing or POS network together with dedicated entry terminals (those vt100's really take a beating and keep going! :-) hooked to a FreeBSD server box. The console of the box itself could run a little application monitor in snazzy syscons colors on some cheapo 14" monitor and VGA card. When the sysop wants to work on it, he or she even has up to 12 virtual screens to work on - woo! That's a lot better than the console interface of any of the systems I used to put together! :-) In situations where even that's impractical, they could use the serial console stuff and a suitably chosen machine racked in a sealed, dustproof (sort of) rack. No vga display or keyboard to cause problems, just a rack and those little industrial terminals and their twisted pair serial connections down on the shop floor. For databases, they could go Ingres or even spend some time beating on postgres to make it something more of what they want. For a lot of applications, however, even that's overkill and they could always just use their own file format and B-trees or something. The DB package we ship with isn't even that bad now, actually, and you could certainly do something like a small sawmill's work-order database with it. Any way you slice it, if you're sure that your underlying OS is stable then you can put the rest together with off-the-shelf PC components (that you've tested extensively) and some custom code of your own. Get a reseller's certification for the low hardware pricing and then walk into small businesses and undercut the turnkey bids. Not hard, since most turnkey systems are EXPENSIVE. It would be an uphill road to climb in competing with the quality of the turnkey software, but even that shouldn't be too hard for 3 really BRIGHT folks with solid motivation to build their own company in that business. It's even kind of fun. You get to see how a lot of busineses work that you never even really thought much about before! Ever wonder how they make fish tanks? Or plastic cups? Or comic books? Or auto parts? I could talk to you about all of these things from the production automation side.. :-) Jordan
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