Squirrel Systems is a

Burnaby Burnaby is a city in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia, Canada. Located in the centre of the Burrard Peninsula, it neighbours the City of Vancouver to the west, the District of North Vancouver across the confluence of the Burrard I ...

-based point of sale vendor specializing in

hospitality Hospitality is the relationship between a guest and a host, wherein the host receives the guest with some amount of goodwill, including the reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers. Louis, chevalier de Jaucourt describes ...

management systems. Squirrel is based in Burnaby,

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

History

Squirrel Systems was founded in 1984, and released the first restaurant point of sale system to use an integrated diskless

touchscreen A touchscreen or touch screen is the assembly of both an input ('touch panel') and output ('display') device. The touch panel is normally layered on the top of an electronic visual display of an information processing system. The display is ofte ...

terminal for order management. Originally a wholly owned subsidiary of Sulcus Hospitality Technologies Corporation, in 1998 Sulcus merged with Eltrax Systems, Incorporated ( Nasdaq SmallCap: ELTX). Squirrel is currently a wholly owned subsidiary of Marin Investments Ltd.

Squirrel Workstation

One of the unique characteristics of Squirrel's original product was the use of hardened LCD touchscreen terminals. Unlike other systems that used keyboards and CRT monitors, Squirrel terminals had no moving parts and were easily adapted to any operating environment. The original Squirrel terminals reached over 35,000 installed units worldwide, and was the first to integrate an LCD panel, credit card reader, employee ID reader, and CPU inside a single unit. Later units would incorporate IP connectivity, remote booting of a customized

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

operating system, and a Java virtual machine.

Squirrel Embedded Linux

In 1998 Squirrel Systems released ''Squirrel Embedded Linux'' (''SEL''), a customized distribution of Linux for "thin client" terminal architecture. ''SEL'' has several characteristics that were unique at the time of development, including primary support for diskless workstations, customized high-volume touchscreen drivers, integrated Java virtual machine with hardware control, and two-stage booting from a Windows server.

Industry awards

* In 2010, O'Charley's named Squirrel as its Enterprise Support Partner of the Year at the annual Inukshuk Business Partner Awards. * Squirrel Systems was awarded the 2009

Epson Seiko Epson Corporation, or simply known as Epson, is a Japanese multinational electronics company and one of the world's largest manufacturers of computer printers and information- and imaging-related equipment. Headquartered in Suwa, Nagano ...

Envision Award for Innovation for its Squirrel in a Box product. * Squirrel Systems was awarded the 1999 Independent Cash Register Dealers Association Silver Award for Outstanding Sponsor in Systems/Software. * In 1998, Squirrel was the third recipient of the Microsoft Retail Application Developer award at the HITEC Show in Los Angeles. Microsoft recognized SquirrelONE as the first application to integrate

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...

Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system developed by Microsoft. As a database server, it is a software product with the primary function of storing and retrieving data as requested by other software applications—which ...

, and

Windows NT Windows NT is a proprietary graphical operating system produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released on July 27, 1993. It is a processor-independent, multiprocessing and multi-user operating system. The first version of Win ...

in the retail market.

References

External links