That’s what they nicknamed the first mechanical cash register (circa 1870). It wasn’t created to automate sales or do addition or any such thing – it was created to stop employees from skimming from the till.
A quirky store owner named John Patterson took the idea and ran with it, turning National Cash Register into a the number one employer in Dayton, Ohio. You remember NCR perhaps?
A ‘zapper’ is a modern day piece of software that removes transactions from a register’s memory so the operator won’t have to pay sales tax.
(I’m working with my friend Michael Fitzgerald on an article on point-of-sale security. Yet another little corner of the world that sounds mundane but actually has all these fascinating little wrinkles and historical oddities.)
How did it stop people skimming from the
till?
x
Well obviously it didn’t :) but it put some controls on each transaction that weren’t there before. Including that bell that rings when the drawer opens – that was to alert the store owner, apparently.
So this is how it goes, eh. People figure out how to steal, owners figure out a defense, people figure out a way around it, and so on. Eventually the defenses are so robust that you have to come up with really complex methods of theft, like “zappers” or “mortgage backed securities”. :)
Every system ever created can
be circumvented because it
has flaws due to being made
by man
=]