Xn Checkout Systems

Djmonster I would love to know everything about these systems as I think they are the most amazing epos system ever invented. Back in the day it was way ahead of its time with the flow meters and scatter pads. In my old place of work because the bar was big we had 4 terminals along with the 4 customer displays above them. And when you used one of the scatter pads, I think there were 6 along the bar front and 6 along the back, it used to bring up the total round amount on the nearest customer display to it! How on earth were they wired to know what scatter pad was near which till ect?

I remember our scatter pads being called unipad 35 because there were 35 buttons on them. Did they make bigger pads with more buttons?

I remember there being the u500 which controlled the terminals and there was also two black boxes called bar mux which if you turned off the scatter pads would turn off but the tills would continue to function. How many terminals could be run off of one u500? And how many scatter pads from one bar mux?

Were the scatter pads programmed independent of the tills because I remember there being several products eg: Bacardi breezer labeled on the pad (which was a paper insert you printed off from the back office) which were not on the terminal any more due to no longer selling it, but of you pressed the bacardi breezer button on the pad it would still show up in the top box on the terminal, which listed all items in your current round.

The customer diaplays were only one line so they used to show the server name and the total of the current round you were doing, but if you voided and item it used to show the item name and minus the price of it. Could it be set up differently to show the name of the item and it's price when you selected them, like voided items but not minus price?

I would love to have a set up of one of these systems to play with and learn about it. In my mind it should be preserved in a computing museum because of how good and important it was for the development of today's epos systems.

I used to work for Checkout so know all about the system

The bar pads had a firmware issue on them which meant that not all the buttons could be used at once (depending on the configuration) which meant they failed to load, so the people setting up the items knew about the restriction and mostly avoided locking everything up by leaving a few spare buttons free.

The Barmux is basically a serial port splitter to link all the bar pads together. Printing worked in the same way, and pressing PMUX sent text to all the printer ports.

The u500 or 5000 (5000 is faster processor, possibly more ports) has a 'heartbeat' light on it which indicated its status. If there is a fault, it will beep continuously and certainly let you know.

There are two hard disks inside the u500 , mirrored , and most of the faults encountered are due to a failure of the mirroring.

The tills are mainly dumb terminals with firmware to draw the buttons etc. if you see SUK001 on the display then it is trying to load the terminal but failing for some reason.

All the hardware and software was made in the UK back in the 90's !

Hi jimbob thank you so much for answering these questions. I remember now that only a few buttons used to work on the scatter pads, the rest just used to say invalid key sequence. We had the u500's which used to flash as you say and whenever one did go wrong it used to non stop beep! I also remember the back office pc had a turbo button on which never made a difference to the ms dos software. The whole system and software was amazing and way ahead of its time.

Did you work for checkout when they developed the xn 700 and Active Business Series? The reason I ask is because I have two xn700 tills and the pc with ABS software but am having a little trouble with them.

Many thanks for your reply.

Here are 2 pictures. One of server keys and the other of the main screen. I will get some more as soon as I can.

Hi there, I know this is a really old thread but i wondered if anyone is still using these machines? If so could you help me with mine

Also id like to see your pictures you have attached but it says i do not have the correct permissions so maybe you could message me the pictures or something like that?

Thanks Chris

Probably nobody interested anymore but for preserving history here is what I recall;

The Unipad 35's were from earlier than the upright classic tills, mid 1980's.
They were part of a set of terminals, Unipad 35, 128 and 256 terminals. The 256's were huge! Unlike the 35's the 128 and 256 terminals had different tones on each button so you could play a tune 🙂
First big customer was the long gone Berni Inns.

The U500's made an appearance in Doctor Who in the Army of Ghosts episode from 2006.

Before becoming Xn Checkout the company was called Checkout Computer Systems and made an appearance on Tomorrows World showing a handheld ordering device which looked looked a bit like the 35 turned on it's side and the display at the top.