It has been a tech life for Allan Young
Allan Young sees a bright future for Point of Sales, the industry that sells and installs retail transaction devices.
Increasingly sophisticated credit card terminals not only speed up transactions, but collect data which allows retailers to create more personalised customer experiences.
“Data accessibility and analytics will complement the customer experience as more and more companies will have to keep up with the competition of Amazon,” Mr Young said.
However, after more than 30 years in the business, he will not be there to witness that first-hand. He is moving on.
The 57-year-old leaves his position as senior technical manager at Go Point, to take on a new role with the Terceira Group, the operator of several Rubis stations.
“I will be helping to manage those stores and anything else that happens, hopefully at a high level,” he said. But leaving the fast evolving POS industry, he says, is bittersweet.
“Even though there is still more to do, it is really time to get off the stage and allow the younger guys to come in,” he said. “It would be great to have more local people in technology.”
He and former business partner John Tester, formed Data-Tech Ltd back in the early 1990s.
“There were a few other POS companies back then,” Mr Young said. “They were not doing what we were doing. We were innovators. We changed the dynamic.”
POS systems have come a long way since the reputed 1879 invention of the cash register, designed by an American saloon keeper to stem the pilfering of his employees, and dubbed the Incorruptible Cashier.
Commonly accepted as the origin of point of sales technology, there were other earlier points of development, including the Cash Recording Machine on the New York market the year before.
Nearly 60 years before, there was the French invention, the world’s first commercially successful calculating machine, the Arithmometer, performing addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
The Abacus was perhaps the first counting device in China reportedly hundreds or thousands of years BC.
But before the eve of the 20th century, how could shopkeepers keep a running tally of operating profits or losses?
Staff requirements to keep a “Day Book” of sales transactions had a number of accounting challenges. How do you overcome illiteracy, dishonesty, laziness and negligence?
Huge advances came from IBM in the early Seventies and the subsequent restaurant usage of a computer-basedsystem, followed by the widespread introduction of credit cards in the early 1980s.
But since then, POS systems have become so much more tech-enabled, freeing businesses to gain access to valuable data.
At that point, he said, stores were using cash registers and there was not much of a POS industry. Credit cards were just coming on the scene in Bermuda.
“We guided Bermuda retailers into it,” Mr Young said. “There was no resistance to it at all.”
He said the new credit card machines, helped retailers track data such as inventory and customer demographics in a way they could not before.
“It was a win-win for everyone,” he said. “Back then, with credit cards, they had what we called ‘knuckle crunchers’. You would put your card inside of a machine, and then you could create seven different copies of the credit card information.”
There was no internet and everything was done over the telephone wires.
Mr Young said in the early days of Data-Tech, the market was wide open. “There were few speed bumps,” he said.
He said today many people take for granted things like being able to tap your credit card to pay for something.
“We just don't even realise that somebody is working in a room to develop the technology to make it work,” he said.
When Data-Tech merged with Go Point in 2018, Mr Young continued with them as the senior technical manager.
“The last few years have been transitional,” he said.
Not much of a reader as a youngster, Mr Young preferred putting together model aeroplanes, or even taking apart the family toaster, just to see how it worked. He studied physics at university.
“Some things were just not for me,” he said. “I loved physics, but I hated the traditional learning environment.”
He sees his life as a journey through technology, including taking electronics courses at the United States Naval Air Station Bermuda in his early twenties, and loving it. “It was learning with my hands,” he said.
From there he found a job as a junior electronics technician at Pearman Watlington. One of his first tasks was fixing old manual typewriters.
“From there, I graduated to electronic typewriters,” he said. “From there, I went on to word processors and then computers.”
You must be Registered or to post comment or to vote.
