Saturday, February 16, 2008

Developing a POS System

Just this morning, my friend and I refurbished an old printer from the pile of junk in his cabinet. It's an EPSON LX 800, a very old model of EPSON's original dot-matrix printer models. The printer still uses the traditional parallel port to communicate with the computer. It's weird, most of the computer these days do not use parallel port anymore. Anyway, I told him, CDR King sells USB to Parallel cable for as low as seventy five pesos. He can use it to connect the old printer to his computer or laptop.

Since that printer is very ancient, he might have problems with the drivers. Or worse, the printer might not be compatible with today's operating systems. I suggested that he start looking for the driver to download from the internet.

The plan is to use the dot-matrix printer for the point of sale system which I am going to develop for their water refill business. Since the pos system requires a fast printer, it would be better to utilize the old printer since the ink cost is cheaper and it can print faster when used on DOS.

I might use Java in developing the POS system. That would be later after graduation.