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Indiana Bakery Uses C64 as POS

Accepted submission by looorg at 2025-01-02 12:50:12 from the bread.bin.bakery dept.
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https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/indiana-bakery-still-using-commodore-64s-originally-released-in-1982-as-point-of-sale-terminals [tomshardware.com]

These things pop up every now and then. The last one I recall now was some car-autorepair-shop in Poland that still used one for some function.

Indiana bakery still using Commodore 64s originally released in 1982 as cash registers — Hilligoss Bakery in Brownsburg sticks to the BASICs

While this may seem questionable— particularly in an era where it seems that nearly all business customers are being pushed to regularly upgrade their PCs— it's actually quite sensible when you consider the processing power required to do Point of Sale transactions, which isn't very much. Even for its age,

It's a very sturdy machine in that regard. You get a large keyboard. There are very few things that can actually break. A lot of them can also break and the machine will still work, just not those things. You could just remove a bunch of chips and still have a working machine -- if you don't sound and a few peripherals. They are not essential in that regard.

Overall, we can't help but appreciate the prudence of Hilligoss Bakery here by not opting for unneeded hardware upgrades when what they have already works. Why create e-waste and spend money you don't have to when your existing retro hardware not only works fine but gives customers something to talk about? Seems like a win-win.

I somehow doubt they do it cause they don't want to create e-waste. That said if they have their own built system running on them they could just start to get "TheC64Mini" as replacement hardware.


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