Retail POS terminals at sales counters such as those in banks and grocery stores are essentially a PC in a custom case attached to printers, scanners and displays. Some of the peripherals are integrated into the POS terminal, such as the keyboard, cash drawer, simple pole display and receipt printer. Others are external to the terminal such as scales, large flat panel pole displays, credit card readers, and bar code scanners. All these external peripherals could be easily network enabled and incorporated into the store LAN and the chain WAN via serial Device servers.

Not only can all these devices be connected using a single Ethernet port, they can be remotely monitored and controlled from any other computer on the network (whether in the back room or around the world) via a simple Internet or Intranet connection. And, as Quatech Ethernet to serial adapters enumerate themselves as standard COM ports compatible with all standard RS-232 devices and the software created for them, not even a single line of the complex, and often proprietary applications used in the checkout process needs to be changed. A typical POS station implemented via a ThinQ Serial Device Server is shown below.