Sun Microsystems, Inc. was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the Network File System (NFS), and SPARC microprocessors. Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. Notable Sun acquisitions include Cray Business Systems Division, Storagetek, and Innotek GmbH, creators of VirtualBox. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982. At its height, the Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California, on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.
The point of sale (POS) or point of purchase (POP) is the time and place at which a retail transaction is completed. At the point of sale, the merchant calculates the amount owed by the customer, indicates that amount, may prepare an invoice for the customer, and indicates the options for the customer to make payment. It is also the point at which a customer makes a payment to the merchant in exchange for goods or after provision of a service. After receiving payment, the merchant may issue a receipt, as proof of transaction, which is usually printed but can also be dispensed with or sent electronically.
The Network Computer was a diskless desktop computer device made by Oracle Corporation from about 1996 to 2000. The devices were designed and manufactured by an alliance, which included Sun Microsystems, IBM, and others. The devices were designed with minimum specifications, based on the Network Computer Reference Profile. The brand was also employed as a marketing term to try to popularize this design of computer within enterprise and among consumers.
Caldera International, Inc., earlier Caldera Systems, was an American software company that existed from 1998 to 2002 and developed and sold Linux- and Unix-based operating system products.
CEN/XFS or XFS provides a client-server architecture for financial applications on the Microsoft Windows platform, especially peripheral devices such as EFTPOS terminals and ATMs which are unique to the financial industry. It is an international standard promoted by the European Committee for Standardization. The standard is based on the WOSA Extensions for Financial Services or WOSA/XFS developed by Microsoft.
A diskless node is a workstation or personal computer without disk drives, which employs network booting to load its operating system from a server.
Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs ("WinFLP") is a thin client release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft and optimized for older, less powerful hardware. It was released on July 8, 2006, nearly two years after its Windows XP SP2 counterpart was released in August 2004, and is not marketed as a full-fledged general purpose operating system, although it is functionally able to perform most of the tasks generally associated with one. It includes only certain functionality for local workloads such as security, management, document viewing related tasks and the .NET Framework. It is designed to work as a client–server solution with RDP clients or other third party clients such as Citrix ICA. Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs reached end of support on April 8, 2014 along with most other Windows XP editions.
Verifone, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Coral Springs, Florida. Verifone provides technology for electronic payment transactions and value-added services at the point-of-sale. Verifone sells merchant-operated, consumer-facing and self-service payment systems to the financial, retail, hospitality, petroleum, government and healthcare industries. The company's products consist of POS electronic payment devices that run its own operating systems, security and encryption software, and certified payment software, and that are designed for both consumer-facing and unattended environments.
Neoware Systems, Inc., was a company that manufactured and marketed thin clients. It also developed and marketed enterprise software, thin client appliances, and related services aimed at reducing the TCO of IT infrastructure.
Comparison of the Java and .NET platforms.
Smallfoot was the name of both a rapid application development toolkit and an embedded operating system designed and released by Caldera Systems/Caldera International/The SCO Group in both UnixWare and Linux formats. Created for use in embedded environments such as point of sale systems and video gaming, the toolkits were intended to create specifically tailored operating systems geared towards the desired use. These customized and stripped down versions of the operating systems made less of a footprint, hence the names Smallfoot embedded UNIX and Smallfoot embedded Linux respectively.
4690 Operating System is a specially designed point of sale (POS) operating system, originally sold by IBM. In 2012, IBM sold its retail business, including this product, to Toshiba, which assumed support. 4690 is widely used by IBM and Toshiba retail customers to run retail systems which run their own applications and others.
Openbravo is a Spanish cloud-based SaaS software provider specializing in retail with headquarters in Pamplona, Spain and offices in Barcelona and Lille. The company was formerly known for being a horizontal open-source enterprise resource planning (ERP) software vendor for different industries.
Geany is a free and open-source lightweight GUI text editor using Scintilla and GTK, including basic IDE features. It is designed to have short load times, with limited dependency on separate packages or external libraries on Linux. It has been ported to a wide range of operating systems, such as BSD, Linux, macOS, Solaris and Windows. The Windows port lacks an embedded terminal window; also missing from the Windows version are the external development tools present under Unix, unless installed separately by the user. Among the supported programming languages and markup languages are C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, PHP, HTML, LaTeX, CSS, Python, Perl, Ruby, Pascal, Haskell, Erlang, Vala and many others.
Revel Systems is an iPad-based point of sale system co-founded by Lisa Falzone and Christopher Ciabarra. It is now majority owned by private equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe.
IBM Retail Store Solutions was IBM's division in the retail market segment. During its run, IBM Retail Store Solutions had several product lines, both hardware and software. Hardware products included IBM SurePOS 700 point-of-sale systems or printers. Software products under its portfolio included IBM 4690, IRES, Lotus Expeditor, Lotus Expeditor Integrator, IBM Store Integrator, IBM Store Integrator Graphic User Interface. Besides those, IBM RSS was responsible for the creation of software such as the 4690 software, IRES. and POSS for DOS. IBM won the 2008 Point of Sale Green Excellence of the Year award. On April 17, 2012, IBM announced a definitive agreement under which Toshiba TEC acquired IBM's Retail Store Solutions business.
Kounta is an Australian software company founded in 2012. The company's flagship product, Kounta, comprises a cloud based point of sale mobile app.
DR-WebSpyder is a DOS web browser, mail client and operating system runtime environment that was developed by Caldera UK in 1997. It was based on the DR-DOS operating system and networking components from Novell as well as the Arachne web browser by Michal Polák of xChaos software. The system was designed to run on low-end desktop systems, but being able to boot and execute from disk as well as from ROM or network, it was also tailored for x86-based thin clients and embedded systems with or without disk drives. Using the web browser as its principal user interface, it could be also used for kiosk systems and set-top boxes. It was ported to Linux in 1999 under the name Embrowser and was renamed Embedix Browser in 2000.
James Walter Melvin is an American entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist who founded and served as the CEO of several notable software companies in the foodservice and hospitality industries. His software products have been installed at more than 125,000 stores worldwide for companies such as McDonald's, YUM! Brands, Burger King, Wendy's, Disney, Darden Restaurants, K-Mart, Costco, FedEx, Walmart, Foot Locker and many others.
Microsoft, a technology company historically known for its opposition to the open source software paradigm, turned to embrace the approach in the 2010s. From the 1970s through 2000s under CEOs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Microsoft viewed the community creation and sharing of communal code, later to be known as free and open source software, as a threat to its business, and both executives spoke negatively against it. In the 2010s, as the industry turned towards cloud, embedded, and mobile computing—technologies powered by open source advances—CEO Satya Nadella led Microsoft towards open source adoption although Microsoft's traditional Windows business continued to grow throughout this period generating revenues of 26.8 billion in the third quarter of 2018, while Microsoft's Azure cloud revenues nearly doubled.
