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by imroot
1239 days ago
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IBM sold their retail technology division to Toshiba a few years ago. Most of their cash register controllers can run on x86, so, it's not dependent on their hardware for the backend. Their cash registers can run the 4690 OS or Windows/Linux/whatever, but, most choose to run the 4690 Operating System due to its security features. I worked at IBM in their retail marketing side in the early 2000's, so, it's possible that everything I've typed here is 20+ years out of date. |
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> I worked at IBM in their retail marketing side in the early 2000's, so, it's possible that everything I've typed here is 20+ years out of date.
4690 is pretty close to dead. Maybe not entirely dead, but closer to that status than it has ever been before. From what I understand, even before IBM sold it to Toshiba, the plan already was to discontinue 4690 and replace it with Linux. At the time of the sale, IBM was in the progress of replacing it with "IRES" (IBM Retail Environment for SUSE); Toshiba has instead chosen as the replacement its own Linux distribution, "TCx Sky", which is a customised version of Wind River Linux.
The terminal release of the 4690 OS was V6R5, released 7 years ago. The latest security update was CSD 2010, released in January 2020. There are probably still some people using it even today, but it is very much a legacy system, with zero plans for any further enhancements; it isn't even clear if there will be any further security updates in the future, or if the January 2020 update was the last one. (I guess it may depend on how many people are still using it, what further security bugs might be discovered, how much those people are willing to pay to fix them, etc).