On Jan 10, 2008, at 4:27 PM, Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
When I worked at Radio Shack in 1996 (in Canada), they were justswitching their POS from a dos (on a Tandy 386) with terminals to a Unix(SCO) system with the same serial terminal. For barcode, they had a device that went between the keyboard and the terminal. Apparently,that way there was no software difference between manually typing in thebarcode number and scanning it.
This is called a "keyboard wedge" in the industry. They're extremely common but they're slowly being replaced by USB devices as PS/2 keyboard ports become less common. A lot of mag stripe readers also work this way.