February/March 2023 - 29

Automated Retail Associates
curbside polling system, called
BuzzBox, which remotely polled
vending machines when a driver pulled
up to a location. Around the same time
CompuVend was established, other
VMS developers followed - including
DISC, Validata and Rutherford
& Associates - and in the 1990s,
Streamware arrived on the scene. These
innovators from the '80s and '90s laid
the foundation for modern VMS.
There were a lot of growing pains
- and major VMS rewrites - during
this period, which traversed from
MS-DOS to Windows 95. For its
part, CompuVend had to rewrite its
application five times, and its handheld
computer program four times.
" But in the past 15 years, since
the cloud came about, we haven't had
major changes in technology and on
platforms, " Kronenberg said.
Succeeding those PC pioneers were
two game-changing VMS technologies.
Cantaloupe Systems and Vendsys,
founded, respectively, in 2002 and 2005,
would change the landscape of VMS.
Cantaloupe's initial innovation was
using remote telemetry to communicate
with machines and enable pre-kitting
and dynamic scheduling. Vendsys,
which was acquired by cashless provider
Nayax, introduced the first cloudbased
VMS. Today, both Cantaloupe
and Nayax are leading cashless
payment solutions providers.
FROM MAINFRAME TO PC
" A decade before the personal
computer, the original VMS ran on
a mainframe computer, " Kronenberg
recalled. " The first VMS provider,
Vendtronics, rented space on a bank's
mainframe located in Chicago.
Operators who could afford the
service would mail their route tickets
to Vendtronics at the end of every
week, and two weeks later they would
receive - by mail - a printout on wide
green bar paper showing how all their
routes did for the week. "
BuzzBox allowed drivers to pull product
before going into locations, eliminating
a trip to each machine to first take count
and record. At left, the device that went
in the machine and attached to the DEX
port. At right, the device the driver had in
the truck. The driver would plug the DEX
cable from the handheld into the receiver
and retrieve data from each machine and
produce a picklist for each machine.
Bulky and expensive, the
Vendtronics system evolved to meet
the demands of those larger operations
that could afford it. The company
eventually allowed operators to install
Vendtronics terminals in their offices,
enabling them to enter their own
route tickets and print out basic
reports. The system finally migrated
to minicomputers, smaller and less
expensive than a mainframe; prices
for minicomputers during the 1970s
started around $40,000.
" After the minicomputer
stage, Vendtronics disappeared, "
Kronenberg recalled. " Another firm
offering VMS on minicomputers
was Effective Management Solutions
(EMS), which had an application for
the manufacturing and distribution
sectors. One of their big clients
operated vending, so they developed
a VMS for them. Again, expensive
hardware and supplemental software
costs made EMS prohibitive for most
operations. Only very large vending
companies could afford their services. "
CompuVend ushered in VMS's
personal computer era on Radio
Shack's TRS-80. The Kronenberg's first
system boasted 64K RAM, a 10MB
hard disk and a dot matrix printer,
which sold for $8,000. By 1988, the
company began offering handheld
computers. The first handhelds cost
Vintage TRS-80 Model 1 (circa 1978). Mark Kronenberg wrote the first version of
CompuVend's software on this computer.
February/March 2023 * VendingMarketWatch.com 29
Automated Retail Associates
http://www.VendingMarketWatch.com
February/March 2023

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