Digital Equipment Corp is making a bid to tempt retailers away from bespoke systems and into using its new software product to link retail electronic point of sale systems and head office systems. DECartian, says the company is suitable for medium and large retailers. It runs on any VAX machine and links a range of electronic point of sales devices, from IBM 4684 for entry of sales transactions, to an ICL 9518, Siemens-Nixdorf 2000 and Omron terminal. The software can be accessed from any location in the network over either leased of dial-up lines. DECartian collects the information it receives from various incompatible point of sales devices and is designed to convert the information into a single data format and stores it in a relational database. Using DEC’s distributed architecture, the database may be accessed from the systems environment. Other applications can access data from the database through Structured Query Language. Prices for the systems start at UKP50,000 for a configuration that includes the help desk feature, the hardware, the software, consultancy and training in use of the system.
