At its core, today’s POS devices still function very much like the cash registers of days gone by. They facilitate and record transactions, provide the customer with a receipt and give the retailer a record of items sold. The move to fully digitize transactions happened slowly, starting with changes to hardware in the 1970s and evolving through the introduction of commercial POS software in the 1990s. Transitioning to software-based POS systems allowed retailers to finally integrate other operational systems with payment and sales data, giving retailers access to new store performance data.
