It's A Living - Part 5



DTS 500 at a Wal-Mart

Fotomat Booth

  From 1978 to 1991, I worked at Capitol Cash Register, now called CCR Data Systems, located in Concord, NH.  I worked on only electronic registers which was fine with me!  They weren't quite as heavy, oily, or inky.  Almost all of the ECR's I mentioned in Part 4, I continued to work on plus additional ones.  It remains to be seen if I can find any pictures of them on the 'net.  The primary line was Data Terminal Systems or DTS that had just started in 1975.  They were unique because they were a US based company nearby in Maynard, MA.  One machine that was passe when I got there, was the DTS Dacap.  The DTS 100 was a tiny little thing that was often found in similarly tiny Fotomat booths.  Invariably, I would go on a service call to a Fotomat about the same time they were having a shift change (there was only room for one person in the booth) on a hot summer day when the AC wasn't working.  A common occurrence was having pennies work their way into the electronics through the top of the machine.  The DTS 150 was a little better with a slightly improved printer.  The DTS 200 sported a dot matrix printer instead of typewheel printers that were in it's predecessors but was constantly prone to lock-ups.  The DTS 300 was more rugged with the proven Seiko EP-101 printer.  The machines were more sophisticated with the advent of the DTS 400 and DTS 440.  They still used the 101 printer but had many more functions.  The 400 was designed for restaurant applications and the 440 for grocery stores.  The DTS 440 was my favourite which I knew inside and out, it was rugged, dependable and relatively easy to service.  When the DTS 500 series came out, they had dot matrix printers and much more sophistication in it's programming.  It did a lot more so there was a lot to go wrong.  When this series came out, dealers now had to have a 'programming department'.

TEC BRC-30

  One machine that was fascinating was TEC's very first ECR that I never saw until I was at CCR.  It was called the TEC Maconic BRC-30.  What was interesting about it was the fact that a third of the machine was still mechanical, taking care of all the printing.  The other two-thirds was the electronics.

  We were also Sweda dealers so had lots of Sweda mechanical and ECR's.  As I previously mentioned, the Sweda ECR's were built by Omron and were very reliable.  There was a small population of MKD Bantam and Victor 560 registers, thank goodness!
  In the early days of CCR, before we had a call center to dispatch us to our calls, the service manager would gave us a fist full of slips that had our service calls for the day.  They were organized into areas, naturally, and, in the summer, when he asked who wanted the Hampton Beach, NH run, everyone volunteered, because they knew that there was the opportunity for girl watching on the beach!
  When the CCR building was built, there was a hole left in the floor between the main floor and the basement.  The electronics department, where I worked, was in the basement.  The intent of the opening was for the future installation of an elevator.  The elevator never happened, and it was a standing joke that we never got an elevator, we only got the shaft.



  Eventually, my primary system that I worked on was the Sweda 80S.  It was a supermarket scanning system using a pair of Data General Nova 1200 computers in a 'backroom' environment.  The scanners and POS (point of sale) terminals were built by Sweda. There were thirteen Shaw's Supermarkets in our area and I had the fun of upgrading most of them from mechanical registers to scanning stores.  By today's standards, the computer was archaic, using 64KB of core memory, which is a fraction of what today's home PC's use.  The hard drive is even more ridiculous, the drawer that is partially pulled out in the photo is a 10MB hard drive and two people can barely carry it.  There is a fixed 5MB disk and a removable 5MB disk (the white circle on top of the drawer).  Things have changed.

  At the frontend, there were checkstand controllers that were a smaller version of the Nova 1200 and were crammed underneath the checkstand.  One of these could control four 'dumb' terminals.  One thing noteworthy about the terminals was the printer.  It was like a Seiko 101 printer, but had a much larger print drum, which made it a slower printer.  What made this printer unique was it's ability to print full alpha, hence the larger drum.  During installation, it was necessary to put pins on hundreds of wires, one at a time, so that the cables could be interconnected to the controllers and back to the mainframe.
  In 1984 I was transferred to Vermont where CCR had established a branch service office in Montpelier.  Hammond-Epco had lost the DTS franchise in the state and we took it over.  Vermont is a beautiful state and it was great to travel all over it on service calls and see it up close.
  The downside to taking over the accounts of another dealer is that you have no programming documentation of the machines.  That meant taking program 'dumps' from the registers and translating them into a hard copy.  The one that was the trickiest was the DTS 440 because a program dump was from a Seiko EP-101 printer.  The printout was whatever the character was on the printdrum for that particular column and position.  The program was written in hexadecimal so there were 16 characters in each set.  It was a matter of identifying the character for each column of each line and convert it to the hex equivalent and inserting it into the appropriate places on the program sheet.
  There were a lot of DTS 440's in many P&C and Grand Union markets.  Later, Price Chopper bought up a lot of these stores.  There were also many smaller businesses with every model of DTS.  In addition, we were heavily engaged in TEC's and serviced just about any other brand; Casio, Sharp, Teknika, etc.
  DTS's new line of ECR's was the DTS 2100, not built by them but by Kyrocera, a Japanese firm.  It was a popular machine that worked fairly well.  It had an interesting bit of engineering in it; if the printer circuit overloaded, it would blow out a transistor to protect the fuse, hmmmmm.  Not long after, Data Terminal Systems got bounced around, first it was sold to National Semiconductor, then they were sold to ICL who was in turn sold to Fujitsu, I hope I have that all correct!

  Yes, I am afraid there is more to come.....