Circuit City goes Linux
Circuit City goes Linux
Posted Feb 16, 2005 21:23 UTC (Wed) by kmmccue (guest, #27945)Parent article: Circuit City goes Linux
Actually, you guys had a lot of the facts but not all of them. There was a project at CC to replace the CC-130 which is what the Circuit City stores run on. The replacement project was called Magellan. This program came out after the RTMX project which was killed. The Magellan project uses the CC-130 and PCPOS clients running Windows XP Embedded. The Magellan solution was rolled out to approx. 100 stores before it was killed. The new project is called RPOS (short for replacement point of sale). This is the IBM solution which uses Linux. The CC-130 uses a Patapsco Designs (company was owned CC) designed mainboard which uses a Motorola 68030 running at 50 MHz. The operating system is VERSAdos and the applications are writting in Pascal. This is the "green screen" that you were mentioning. The screen is actually black and white and it runs on at dumb terminal such the one made by LINK or if you using the PCPOS client it is accessed via an Act5a emulation program.
Posted Aug 29, 2005 23:41 UTC (Mon)
by jpatten (guest, #32154)
[Link]
P.S. - RPOS stands for Retek Point of Sale from what I have read.
http://www.novell.com/industries/retail/wp_perfectstorm.html search for retek on that page
As a store technician for Circuit City (who has now outsourced our jobs to ADT, an IBM partner) I can confirm that the last of these statements is true. The main sales system, the CC-130 is a 68030 motorola 50MHz VersaDOS based system with 128MB ( yes 128 MB ) of RAM and is written in pascal. The Magellan system is completely different (dual xeon with 10 or so hard drives), is written in java and is developed by HP with windows 2k server OS. The MAJOR downfall to the magellan POS system is that is completely dependant on the CC-130 POS server in every way (sales, inventory lookup, employee and customer data, you name it) so if the creaky old CC-130 hardware decides to let its smoke out (and beleive me it does happen more than you might think) the store is completely helpless and I get called out on site until it's fixed (3 or 4 A.M.) The stores have recently started receiving the new linux terminals and IBM has been on site installing the new linux server equipment in a few of my stores. I can only say one thing: It is GLORIOUS. The terminal equipment seems very sturdy, has nice eye candy, and it is under warranty for 1 year from IBM. meaning I don't get to touch it :-( Look for the new system after the holidays (Jan or Feb 2006 for most stores) because all the old veteran employees might have a tough time learning a completely different sales system before the day after thanksgiving ;-).Circuit City goes Linux