Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Software Gore
A community for posting software malfunctions
Deliberately bad software or bad design is not software gore, it must be something unintentional
Icon base by Delapouite under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient and shear it
My guess is: bigger pool of windows programmers than *nix or embedded so maybe that makes it easier to find someone low paid to crank out the crap software or maybe it is quicker? Presumably this runs off the same hardware as the cash register and kitchen order monitors.
They run windows embedded. They are pretty shitty industrial PCs manufactured for Delphi (there are other brands but they’re all pretty much the same) running on 486s with 512mb or 1gb of RAM. The Aloha server runs a service that communicates with the display via serial or TCP/IP. The other guy that made a joke about it running windows 7 was too generous, every single one I’ve worked on is running Windows Embedded 2002 (AKA XP.)
They are purpose built, passively cooled, waterproof, and very robust industrial PCs. They pre-date using embedded Linux in everything and the effort of building a specialized kernel likely isn’t worth the effort. Since the industry is moving to DMBs (Digital Menu Boards) in drive throughs anyway, these will likely be the last iteration since they can just display the order on the DMB itself.
Kitchen monitors are also industrial PCs running Windows Embedded, but NCR makes those and they’re updated a lot. NCR (and their Aloha system) are fully committed to Windows for some reason, but Windows Embedded and IoT are pretty much on par with Linux for this application. That’s basically what it was made to do, and it works better than you might think.
Sorry about the info dump, I used to be an embedded systems engineer and I’ve spent the past decade in restaurant IT.
Genuinely curious, is there a job market for these devices and is it in .NET or something lower-level like C++?
Don't apologise, this was super interesting to read about