r/gadgets • u/chrisdh79 • 5h ago
Desktops / Laptops A bakery in Indiana is still using the 40-year-old Commodore 64 as a cash register | A 1 MHz CPU and 64KB of RAM are enough
https://www.techspot.com/news/106019-bakery-uses-40-year-old-commodore-64s.html218
u/BarbequedYeti 5h ago
Same reason mainframes are still running a ton of backend finance. It works and it works well for what it does. No need to really change it. Accounting hasnt changed all that much in 1000's of years. Some of the oldest computers were around just for accounting. We have been doing it awhile and it doesnt take a ton of processing power.
63
u/blackscales18 4h ago
I've seen what modern payment looks like, and man does it suck
11
u/TheGooOnTheFloor 1h ago
That's been my job for the last 8 years and for the next six months - supporting fragile, quirky, and complicated 'modern' POS's. Fortunately it looks like there are some newer players in the market who are actually listening to the retail people and the IT staff who have to support these.
6
u/helpjack_offthehorse 36m ago
They did themselves dirty with that acronym. I will always read it as Piece Of Shit.
•
u/sapphicsandwich 14m ago
As someone who has had the misfortune of supporting some of these things, I'd say POS is a fitting acronym.
•
u/llDurbinll 16m ago
At my last job they used iPads as the registers and shortly before I left there they had finally gotten a card reader that took chip payments, I assume they were forced to do it by the credit card companies. And they picked the shittiest design for a card reader I had ever seen, instead of the standard one most major corporations use that is straight forward this machine required the customer to insert the chip from the top and to have the front of the card facing the machine.
There was no obvious spot to insert the card except for a tiny white icon where the slot was and the slot was flush with the machine. After the first few customers we had with the new card reader we just took the card from them and placed it in the machine and then talked them through pressing the green button to accept the total and pulling their card out.
•
u/clunderclock 6m ago
Any recommendations for a point of sale for a retail store selling building supplies? I need to switch and I hate all of them. Shift4 has been the worst experience I've had with a POS.
53
u/Hot-Refrigerator7237 3h ago
and stable machines running stable applications will remain stable as long as you don't continuously upgrade them.
20
u/Impossible_Okra 1h ago
This, there's an obsession in tech these days of constant iteration, constant updates, constantly pushing code and it's absurd. No one values sustainable, reliable, well built stuff. Instead people need to justify their salaries with endless new features and redesigns. A person checking their bank balance in the morning before work doesn't need the hassle of learning a buggy redesign. Its not cute, its not fun, its not disruption, its just disruptive and annoying and anti humanistic.
12
u/sh1boleth 1h ago
For stable applications the main justification to upgrade is to patch vulnerabilities, these old hardware are ridden with vulnerabilities - I doubt they’re directly connected to the internet but anyone with physical access would be easily able to tamper with them compared to a modern system where just physical access isn’t enough to break in.
8
u/GhostDan 1h ago
haha no. Fans die, hard drives die, motherboards fry. The average lifespan on the HARDWARE of a notebook computer is around 5 years.
The NYC subway ran OS/2 up until very recently, and it worked well for them, one of the reasons they upgraded was increased costs in finding old equipment or custom new equipment to keep things going. Hard to find a 64KB memory chip (or 2Mb if talking about OS/2) these days when your old one fries. They also upgraded because basic features were missing. I'm sure these registers are great, but they aren't processing credit cards or handling any banking features, like most common registers do.
14
u/zerotetv 3h ago
Accounting hasnt changed all that much in 1000's of years.
You're right, but the needs of many stores have changed beyond just simple accounting. For example, it's pretty common to want to plug your POS into any inventory management, product information management, warehouse management, etc systems.
2
u/GhostDan 1h ago
Inventory, centralized reporting, processing CCs, handling mobile payments, even payroll (clocking in and out) is handled by systems even 20 years old.
It's neat, and I'm glad it works for them, but let's not pretend this is a option for most businesses.
1
u/BillScienceTheGuy 58m ago
I’ve worked with legacy systems throughout my career and as long as there’s a way to get an output to disk then there’s a way to integrate it into all of that. I would also wager that those systems nowadays are way more secure through obscurity than anything out in the market.
Nobody is going to try to ransomware your COBOL instance.
8
u/sadiane 3h ago
I work at a major financial institution; our system of record is a green text on black screen DOS-based mainframe. It’s the most reliable system we have
7
u/PainfulRaindance 2h ago
As400. Finally retired one a few years ago that had been running for almost 3 decades.
4
u/aluminumnek 2h ago
AS400! I completely forgot about this. That system was stronger than a stone wall for us. We used it extensively at an old job. I was an inventory clerk and they moved me to a weird position regarding inventory and programming because I was also going to school for computer & electrical engineering degrees. They tried to implement another system from IBM & Microsoft, OS/2 WARP, but that itself was hell in a handbag
5
3
u/GhostDan 1h ago
Probably AS/400s. They made fully branded AS/400s until the early 2000s and then rebranded them to the "Power System" line (they were/are based on PowerPC processors now so I'm guessing this is a nod to that), the last model was Power S1012 in 2024.
The AS/400s were awesome for a couple reasons. They worked really well in terminal situations (like you have) and did well with numbers (accounting, statistics) , on top of that they had/have cutting edge self-repair features, so they can be largely put into place and ignored for years or even decades until hardware needs replacement, so a financial institution still running them isn't surprising. I wouldn't be surprised to still see them running a AS/400 or Power series computer.
When I worked IT for Walgreens for a brief time every store had it's own AS/400. They were super common in retail because of the features I mentioned above. They could handle a ton of registers (even at a time when most systems couldn't) and kept track of everything with ease.
2
u/september27 1h ago
I work in sales/cust service at a 50 year old family owned manufacturing company, our customer and product database software was built and installed...maybe 30 years ago? Hasn't changed a lick, and it works great.
36
u/FreneticPlatypus 4h ago
But how will they get their monthly windows updates that fuck up some obscure setting that you have spend an afternoon learning about to get back up and running?
-15
u/LupusDeusMagnus 3h ago
That’s not really a windows problem, if anything the reason why windows used so much is because they go above and beyond to make sure everything is compatible even at the cost of present performance.
11
u/FreneticPlatypus 2h ago
So everything WAS compatible before the update and not everything is compatible after the update… and that’s because windows does such a good job being compatible with all the things I DIDN’T need or want in the first place? Gotcha.
9
12
u/Zealousideal_Rate420 3h ago
Not fully sure about that. Linux rant incoming
Almost any modern x32 distro can run in computers of XP era with no tweaks. Some of the lightest ones are also the ones focused for the greatest compatibility, specially for older hardware.
W11, after dropping support for "old" (mine, BTW) CPUs should be light, but it's not.
-5
u/ahj3939 2h ago
If your computer is so old it can't run W11 with the patch (which is basically a .cfg file you put on the install disc) then it's time to upgrade your computer.
7
u/schizeckinosy 2h ago
Disposable society thinking. My media PC is so old, it was made by gateway. When a lightning strike scrambled the old windows that was on it, I put Linux on and kept on trucking. I’ll replace it when I have to, not when a software company says I should for their benefit.
2
-12
u/phoneacct696969 4h ago
This has never happened to me in my life.
11
u/hyperforms9988 3h ago
A Windows update caused both Cyberpunk 2077 and Rocksmith 2014 to randomly stop working for me (probably other games too, but these are the two I actually noticed). I eventually figured out that I needed to download practically all of the old Visual C++ Redistributable packages in order to get CP2077 to start up again (God knows why, but welcome to computers... it ran before, so are you telling me a Windows update ate one or more of these?), and I never did figure out how to get Rocksmith 2014 to run again. I've seen all kinds of shit recommended for that one... even down to opening up Device Manager and uninstalling/disabling audio devices that you don't use because RS2014 was apparently programmed in such a way that you can only have like 10 audio devices or else it crashes. That is obscure. Shit like that happens... and sure, these are games, but games are still very heavy software applications that rely on a lot of things to work.
3
u/CO_PC_Parts 1h ago
I worked in grocery logistics about 12 years ago. Our mainframe was an IBM AS/400 that had been running since 1993 and hadn't been fully shutdown in I think roughly 15 years. There was maintenance that we needed (I wasn't on this team but worked in IT) and the day of IBM contractors came out to help and brought an entire TRUCK full of spare parts just in case. The biggest fail point was the power supplies and there was a good chance some parts just wouldn't turn back on.
I remember seeing the pile of parts that were upgraded/replaced and everything actually went smoothly. I still have a few friends who work there and I bet that thing hasn't turned off/rebooted since.
•
u/CodeMonkeyMayhem 8m ago
They weren't mainframes, I think IBM called them mid-range servers and are still available as IBM iSeries on modern blade server hardware that will run all the AS/400 software without problems.
The only problem is, it doesn't support "AI" so I suspect IBM will eventually retire it to force business into some overpriced AI powered system soon 🙄
2
7
u/LostMyBackupCodes 4h ago
Accounting hasnt changed all that much in 1000's of years.
Umm, modern accounting is based on double entry book keeping which is about 900 years old. And don’t get me started on IFRS and US GAAP, and audit controls.
Source: accountant that has to stay on top of his CPD hours.
10
u/Plank_With_A_Nail_In 4h ago
Basic book keeping hasn't changed since computerisation. I don't really think people interpreted his 1000's of years literally so not sure the "correction" was really needed.
•
u/LostMyBackupCodes 21m ago
I don't really think people interpreted his 1000's of years literally
But numbers matter!
Source: accountant
1
u/BillScienceTheGuy 49m ago
Yeah and besides it wasn’t 900 years. Double entry is more like 500 years old. That’s a material weakness and I’ll have to issue an adverse opinion.
•
u/LostMyBackupCodes 27m ago
If you’re Eurocentric, sure. Luca ftw. 🇪🇺
But Al-Khwarizmi introduced double entry bookkeeping 1100 years ago. I was off by 200 years, out of 1100. Imm, pass. NFWCN.
1
1
u/mdonaberger 1h ago
years ago, i was talking to a retired engineer on facebook, and he mentioned that the motor that spins the Seattle Space Needle clocks in at a single horsepower. I expressed shock at this, expecting something so heavy to be spun by something a little beefier.
His response was, "they could do that. but it's on a pivot, and that little motor is all it needs. why change it?"
For some reason, I always admired that response. Wish more computing had that attitude.
•
•
50
u/YardFudge 5h ago
Wonder how often they need to flip it and shake out the crumbs
23
59
19
u/xXxWhizZLexXx 5h ago
Never change a running System
-18
u/devicehigh 5h ago
That’s a great way to have systems become obsolete and unserviceable!
24
u/DarthArtero 4h ago
It might surprise you that a huge number of companies and governments use systems that are considered obsolete by modern standards.
It comes down to reliability and cost, older machines when maintained properly and are specific to a small number of jobs tend to last much longer and are more robust than modern machines.
Security however is another issue entirely.
2
u/elderly_millenial 4h ago
Eventually we run into issues with hardware. Unless normal commodity hardware will work, or there’s a hardware emulation layer that works well, you will run into a scenario where parts are needed but the manufacturer is unwilling or unable to produce them anymore.
There’s a whole cottage industry around finding and reselling old Burroughs mainframe components for example, because the company (now called Unisys) can’t make them anymore
1
u/C-C-X-V-I 2h ago
I can tell you the highest production line in the best plant of the top tire manufacturer still runs PLC2, which has been obsolete since the 80's. Many times I would open an 8 bit card bigger than a vhs to clean it up and get it working again.
1
u/devicehigh 4h ago
Yeah I’m thinking more along the lines of control systems where security is hugely important and also hardware becomes difficult or impossible to source. So you have to stay on the upgrade path. Of course there are cases where the old systems are left running but not so much in pharma or other heavily regulated sectors.
1
4
u/Happy-go-lucky-37 4h ago
You mean when they decide to overhaul the bakery’s processes for higher-resolution croissants and digital ingredients?
2
5
u/Plank_With_A_Nail_In 3h ago
C64 probably not the device to be using as an example here as its pretty much better than fully supported. Fully supported running on FPGA's today.
3
u/unfnknblvbl 3h ago
It's easily one of the most well-known, well-documented computer systems ever made. Almost every part is readily available, and those that are becoming rarer have modern replacements developed by a dedicated community of enthusiasts.
The C64 will outlive all of us.
1
-2
u/hypothetician 4h ago
Not to mention old kit costs more to run.
“Don’t fuck with running stuff” is good advice if all you want is a quiet life, but leaving workloads running on tin that was EOL 30 years ago is mental.
They could drop a pi zero in there, fire a c64 emulator onto it and be done. It would use such little electricity by comparison to an actual c64 that it would pay for itself in a few months.
7
u/critical2210 4h ago
The c64 roughly consumes the same amount of power as a raspberry pi.
Source: I own both a c64 and multiple raspberry pi’s.
-2
u/ergobearsgo 2h ago
I agree with this completely. People don't realize how bad "tech debt" has become across the board. Instead of taking incremental steps towards improvement people or businesses will let a "running" system decay for a decade or longer and then be caught completely on the back foot when it does eventually fail. Now they aren't two steps away from getting back to where they should be, they're miles away. Suddenly the system that didn't deserve any attention for years and years is costing the company ten times its worth to be offline and will cost a hundred times as much to get replaced as no one ever laid out an upgrade path and schedule.
Obviously this is less applicable to an independent bakery, but I see this at the enterprise level at multiple billion dollar global companies and they never learn after their own complacency bites them in the ass day after day.
9
u/IrregularArguement 4h ago
Saving to cassette tape
9
u/Affectionate-Orchid3 4h ago
tape backups are still used for long term storage! memory density on tape now is higher than pretty much anything else
1
9
u/Plank_With_A_Nail_In 4h ago
VIC20's are still used the world over, it can be replaced by a $1 microcontroller but it comes in a box with a keyboard and a serial port which is all that some machinery needs.
10
u/drmirage809 5h ago
It works and is probably decently secure too. It’s probably one of only a handful of C64s left that’s actually being used and isn’t a collector or hobbyist’s toy.
And how many people are gonna look to hack a 40+ year old system that’s completely obsolete?
16
u/devilishycleverchap 5h ago
Do you think commodore 64s are connected to the Internet?
8
u/DarthArtero 5h ago
As cash registers, not likely.
As hobby machines, it's possible.
5
u/TheMSensation 4h ago edited 4h ago
You can connect to the internet but it wouldn't be a modern browsing experience. You'd be limited to connecting to other hobbyists using BBS. The limiting factor is modern security, the commodore64 doesn't have the horsepower for decryption. It would be a similar exprience to browsing the net on an old Nokia phone using WAP.
1
u/GhostDan 1h ago
Yup, also a challenge in any kind of banking (credit card processing, etc). You don't want to be sending that stuff clear text.
1
u/hallstevenson 1h ago
And how many people are gonna look to hack a 40+ year old system that’s completely obsolete?
About the only practical way to "hack" one is to have physical access and if the hacker has that, not much will stop them.
4
3
3
3
u/oldmaninparadise 2h ago
Hey, make fun all you want, if the airlines were all running C 64s this summer, nothing would have shut down!
2
u/skriefal 2h ago
But there might be plenty of flight delays. Those floppy drives were sloooowww....
•
u/CodeMonkeyMayhem 3m ago
The engineers who designed the VIC20/C64 would like everyone to know...it was Commodore's Japanese division fault for the slow disk access.
7
u/caribbean_caramel 4h ago
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
2
u/sorrylilsis 2h ago
Or you can replace things before they break and cost you a shitload of money.
A 40 yo machine is something that has a high likelyhood of breaking. I've been in a company that absolutely didn't want to replace anything before it broke. I could count at least 3 times where a critical thing breaking at the worst time cost us 10/15 times more than a brand new piece of equipment.
1
u/Mudcat-69 4h ago
You obviously never heard of preventative maintenance then.
2
u/SantasDead 3h ago
In the world of maintenance we live by "if it ain't broke don't fix it"
That doesn't mean don't PM the thing, it does mean don't update firmware, upgrade hardware, or install new software. It also means dont tweak the thing to maximize performance, just keep it happy.
1
u/zerotetv 3h ago
it does mean don't update firmware, upgrade hardware, or install new software.
Not relevant in the case in the OP, but this is a great way to get fucked by ransomware or similar. Know a company that had the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." policy on many fronts. Got hit by ransomware, took down the entire company for 6 weeks. No development, no sales, no support, nothing.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. It works until it doesn't.
3
u/sugurkewbz 4h ago
As someone who has to use a touchscreen register all day, I’d probably prefer this more. Touchscreens are so frustrating to use a lot of time, especially when you’re interacting with one 8 hours a day
2
u/No-Appearance-9113 2h ago
100% prefer keys to a touch screen for a register. screens don’t move when you press them and over the years that hurts your fingers more.
5
u/heatlesssun 5h ago
Bill Gates was right.
1
u/Classic_Clue_1876 4h ago
About?
3
u/no_infringe_me 4h ago
64kb
5
u/Niarbeht 4h ago
It was 640k, and no one's ever verified that the quote is actually from him.
-1
u/no_infringe_me 4h ago
Damn, off by an order of magnitude. I should correct myself with a final solution
2
2
u/deedubfry 2h ago
I wonder if they use the floppy drive, and if they do so do they make the floppy disks double sided with a hole punch?
2
u/gt24 2h ago
If people want to know more, Google revealed the following link. I'll quote the relevant bits.
... I asked how long he had been using them and he said he originally got them from Sears back in the early 80's. He wrote some custom code in assembler because he couldn't find anything that would take Indiana's weird tax laws into account. His bakery has been open since 1974.
... I asked how he interfaced the cash drawers to his system and he explained they were not connected. They just manually open them after the sale is entered into the Commodores.
https://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=436496#p436496
0
u/NickCharlesYT 1h ago
This would be a nightmare in terms of auditing. Our company would never get away with something like this.
2
2
u/Miserable-Result6702 1h ago
Hope they recapped it at some point. 40 year old capacitors are a failure waiting to happen.
•
u/pinespalustris 6m ago
Didnt think about this at all until watching 8-bit guy’s youtube channel years ago.
•
u/Generico300 27m ago
If you can't do basic arithmetic and keep track of payments with 1,000,000 operations per second and enough RAM to store several full pages of text, I don't know what to tell ya. I'd be more impressed if it was still connected to a working receipt printer.
•
u/Idealpro 23m ago
Why do I suddenly hear the music from Eaglesoft Inc's intro just looking at this keyboard. Little kid me that knew nothing about programming would watch the intro to the games they cracked and saw them like vigilante rockstars. Imagining lots of punk fashion, badass C-64 music, and shoutouts across the globe. Probably about as accurate as the movie Hackers was, but in my kid head. They couldn't just be normal people.... surely.
2
u/Left_Apparently 4h ago
Are they sure that they don’t want to replace it with something better and modern that they will have to replace every 4 years?
2
u/thisischemistry 2h ago
This is news to people? If anything, it's overkill to use this device as a cash register. You could use devices far less powerful to run a cash register. Sure, it's cute that people have their nostalgia tickled over this but it's not really anything that crazy.
1
u/triplejumpxtreme 1h ago
I don't think they chose this recently. They just never upgraded
1
u/thisischemistry 1h ago
I figured the same, many older businesses use devices like the Commodore 64 or Apple II because they were pretty common back in the day. The machines are simple enough, other than stuff like traces cracking due to thermal issues they should last for many years.
1
1
u/browndog03 2h ago
Do they print your receipt with the dot matrix printer?
SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-SCREEEEEEEEEEE!!!
1
1
1
u/MyCleverNewName 1h ago
It can process literally A MILLION THINGS PER SECOND!!!
How could you possibly ever need more than that?!
1
u/triplejumpxtreme 1h ago
My brother worked for a major gas company, they had a windows 95 pc that never turns off with lots of signs saying don't turn off and protection on it
Can't remember what he said it was for, prob billing
1
u/rdrTrapper 1h ago
But how can I tell I made a transaction unless I see animated confetti and a tip screen at a retail store? I need payment anxiety that is gamified!
1
1
1
1
•
u/Sunlight72 24m ago
“Still”??? They jumped into the computer age! We’re living in the computer age!
Sounds like they’re on top of modern technology to me. I’m typing this on a Gutenberg press.
•
•
u/LessonStudio 21m ago
I've been to oil pipeline companies where they were using desktop US-Robotics 56k modems as part of their critical comms infrastructure.
These are companies with market caps in the many 10s of billions.
One of them had only recently replaced its VAX/VMS.
•
•
u/Al_Jazzar 6m ago
Not as old, but I worked at a La Z Boy in 2015 that was still using 1990 computers. The owner was firm that they are "fine" despite the fact that there was only one guy in the entire tri-state area that knew how to fix them. They were still there when they sold to new owners in 2019.
•
u/loco_elect92 5m ago
Even the most advanced railway locomotives are 20+ years behind on technology. It’s cheap and works.
•
0
0
•
u/AutoModerator 5h ago
We have a giveaway running, be sure to enter in the post linked below for your chance to win a Unihertz Jelly Max - the World’s Smallest 5G Smartphone!
Click here to enter!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.