* Novell releases Novell Linux Point of Service 9
Maybe the headline of this issue should be: “Everything old is new again.” Or perhaps “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. ” would be better.
Novell has just announced a point-of-sale (POS) system. Well, Novell is calling it “Novell Linux Point of Service 9” but those of us who’ve spent any time in the retail industry know that it’s just the latest version of a POS system.
My first Novell server ran a POS system, back in 1986. The hardware was an IBM XT, with two (2!) external 5M-byte hard drives. It ran NetWare 4.61b (a non-dedicated operating system) in just 512K-bytes of RAM – with 256K-bytes of that available to the non-dedicated workstation. There were also two (2!) IBM PCs connected to the server via a 1M-bit/sec coaxial cable. Man, they really smoked. By 1990, when we moved to NetWare 2.15, the server had become a dedicated platform, the connected workstations had grown to four, and the coax now handled 10M bit/sec Ethernet. Ah, progress.
This new system from Novell runs on SuSE Linux servers, and Novell Linux Desktop. Of course, the server is once again “non-dedicated”. And the hardware requirements are a little “heavier”: 512M-byte to 3G-byte RAM, at least 256M-byte per CPU and 4G-byte hard disk space.
The new system will be sold by Novell directly, but will also be carried, promoted and supported by partners IBM (as part of its IBM Retail Environment for SuSE Linux) and Wincor Nixdorf. I wasn’t all that surprised to learn that IBM is the world’s biggest supplier of POS systems. Wincor Nixdorf, maker of a hardware/software POS-in-a-box solution called Beetle, will now embed the Novell offering into that platform.
In 1991, when I left my retailer employer, Novell was releasing NetWare 3 and the retailer was moving to SCO’s Xenix, a Unix platform that was also gaining a great deal of success as a POS environment around that time. As the ’90s progressed, though, Microsoft and Windows became a bigger presence in the POS field, as in just about everything else, and Novell was pushed out.
Perhaps Novell’s latest system will give me that comfortable déjà vu feeling, the kind you get when you see the house you grew up in after a long absence. Or maybe, like Albert Einstein, I’ll be saying “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Make your own decision, visit the product pages (https://www.novell.com/products/linuxretailsolution) and read all about it.
