Some time ago, I told the story of the time the development manager for Windows 95 bought one copy of every PC program in the Egghead Software store.
I learned that in addition to stunning the store manager, this creative operation almost didn’t work: The store’s cash register crashed whenever the total exceeded $10,000. Because like, c’mon, who would buy $10,000 of stuff by just walking into a store? If you’re going to buy that much stuff, you would use a purchase order, right?
The order had to be broken up into chunks so that each chunk totaled less than $10,000.
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The comments here all remind me.. there are only two hard problems — naming things, and cashing.
Tale from my father, who worked on Banking software in the UK in the 70's. They designed the software to allow multiple payments per day for a "rent to own" scheme for appliances. They figured a person might do two, maybe three, possibly four transactions in a day, so just in case they set the size of the "daily transaction index" to 4 bits. That's enough for 15 different payments for what's normally a single weekly payment.
Enter the alcoholic cabbie who, after every fare, would deposit the fare money so as to avoid temptation.
The quick-and-dirty solution was to pay off...
I remember being amused a few years ago when I bought something at a Best Buy near me.
When I was checking out, I saw a sign on the register, that said something like “Please note: we can only accept up to five different types of payment in one transaction.”
I’m absolutely certain they figured that one out the hard way.
So it was a crash register, then?
I once worked on a POS application where we found out the hard way there was a 256 item limit on a transaction. Been decades now, but if I remember the story correctly it was because Janet Jackson went to a record store (remember those?) in NY and bought a large volume of LPs and CDs
Wow. Apparently, Janet Jackson was on a havoc spree in the late 90s, crashing laptops and cash registers.