One day while I was whittling my life away just letting the web take me were it would, I did a search on the place of my first full-time employmment: Tranti Systems Incorporated.
I was quite surprised to find that the only hits I came upon where for vendors selling replacement parts (cash drawers, printer ribbons, etc.) and a few brief mentions on the GEAC website regarding their eventual acquisition of the company.
While never a large company, there was a period of where Tranti was a major player in the fast-food restaurant POS (point-of-sale) market.
Here's what I can tell. I arrived in 1990 (post-peak again for me, I'm always too late) when the company had already started on a downward path.
Tranti's System 29 had been a huge success for the company for several years but the company was struggling with its eventual successor to the System 29, the System 105.
I was hired to provide tech support for the 105. I always felt a little like a second class citizen as the 29 was the true cash cow of the company and the 105 was the dog trying to lap at the free milk. There were probably a dozen or more 29 support reps, there were 2 of us supporting the 105, and my position was really only available because the other 105 rep was starting to have a nervous breakdown from doing beeper duty every night, weekend, and holiday (unlike some other jobs where you carried a beeper but it might very rarely go off, these beepers very rarely shut off. And during the lightning season down South, fuggetaboutit.
The System 105 consisted of the KS-105 (for Keystation) registers and the RM-105 (for Routing Manager) unit along with other ancilliary support devices (mainly video monitors and little brown boxes with two big orange buttons called Next-Done Boxes). The KS-105 were were daisy-chained together via IEEE-488 and connected into the RM. The RM had 6 (I believe) BNC video ports for different monitors and some sort of port for the Next-Done boxes. The RM was the brains of the system. It took all of the orders being input on all the registers and forwarded appropriate items to the video monitors in the restaurant's staging areas. The Next-Done boxes where used by stagers to move items along the monitors as orders where processed. Needless to say, when the RM failed, things got very bad, very fast, and I still have nightmares of managers calling in saying they had somebody named "Norm" flashing his name on all their register's screens ("Norm" was really "NoRM"). There was basically a process to hard-reset the RM where you'd hold in a little recessed reset switch with a pen or pencil, then cycle power to the unit while continuing to hold in the reset switch for 20 seconds or so. Sometimes this made Norm go away.....but sometimes it didn't.
I don't know anything about the RM internals, and I'm not too sure about any other of the internals for the registers since we didn't deal with any motherboard components. The actual register code was on either 1 or 2 EPROMs. I think when I started the code was at version 4.11 or something like that and it was on 1 EPROM. Later when we bumped to version 5.xx I believe we utilized both sockets on the main board. There was something that looked like a ROM cartridge for each machine too, but it wasn't ROM, it was writable and it was used to store the register's sales totals in case of some sort of power supply failure. I guess there was a little battery inside which sometimes would fail unexpectedly so after telling some fretful manager not to worry, they could get their reports after someone dumped a coke inside their keystation, you would sometime has to backpeddle since the backup sometimes failed to. Their was a mylar keypad for data entry, and an optional thermal printer that I think was connected with an RJ-45 cable, but I'm not positive.
Other items Tranti sold in this timeframe was also a timeclock system, which was an IBM PC Convertible heavily modified in a special case that hung on the wall and with a special (mylar again) keyboard, and a Manager's Workstation which was a 286 system that connnected to the registers and timeclock and polled sales, etc. These systems could them be polled from the home office to upload sales and labor data.
The 105 never achieved the success or the acceptance of the 29. While I was still at Tranti, they began work on the successor to the 105, which was the System 2100. The 2100 was mainly off the shelf PC components in a modified case with some special hardware (like the periscope display LCD). These were 286 machines (originally, near the tail end we were shipping 386's) that ran DOS and used Lantastic to network everything together over thinnet ethernet. This was actually my first exposure to networked computers, believe it or not.
I started supporting the 2100 which was mainly in a pilot stage, Tranti was trying to get Dunkin Donuts to accept the system as a corporate certified POS for franchisees. I split in the spring of 1993, after almost 3 years. Eventually Tranti was purchased by GEAC and the 2100 was sold as GEAC's low-cost POS offering.
If you have any more information that you could share (especially photos of some of the systems) please email me.
