Linux Journal: Linux in the Retail Market

“In a past life, I worked on embedded systems for the retail
market. These systems used all custom software, with a lot of
custom hardware tossed in as well. This experience tuned me into
the custom software/hardware market, and I continue to read about
what is happening in it. In fact, the September 2003 issue of
Retail Systems Reseller is the inspiration for this article.

“Over the past few years, Retail Systems Reseller and other
industry magazines have tended to support proprietary solutions,
whether they were constructed in-house or built on top of Microsoft
operating systems. The best explanation for their support is that
older solutions tended to be in-house proprietary or built on top
of a small real-time kernel. This situation was necessary, because
a lot of functionality had to be crammed into a slow CPU with
limited RAM.

“As inexpensive CPUs became faster and RAM became larger,
purchasing more software became cost-effective, because there now
was space and speed to run less optimal solutions. In return,
device drivers no longer had to be written for many common
peripherals. The downside, of course, is the OS now had to be
treated as a black box; previously, it was code that could be
viewed and modified as needed…”

Complete
Story