The Register Home Page Biting the hand that feeds IT

On Call Life is filled with random events, but The Register tries to make readers’ lives just a little more predictable by always using Friday morning to bring you a new instalment of On Call – the reader-contributed column that shares your tech support stories.

This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Benny” who in the 1990s worked for a large Australian telco and was sent to fix a recurring problem at a gardening shop – the sort of big box store that sells plants by the acre, and tools by the wheelbarrow-load.

This shop’s point of sale card reading terminals were failing several times a day and Benny was sent to investigate.

"They had a master terminal that had a line back to a Honeywell DPS6 at one of the local exchanges, and the other terminals were connected to the master terminal on an RS485 bus," he explained ...