Point of Sale Products
                         Since 1981

 

No brag just fact, we have outlasted most of the starters in the PC world. In fact we got started before IBM decided it wanted back in again.

In this world to change is to survive. Just ask Big Blue (IBM) or us for that matter.

Point of Sale Products has been around doing business continuously in one form or another since the spring of 1981. In that year we incorporated in upstate Utah under the name of FMK Enterprises. F was for Fred, M was for Michael and K was for Kerry. Unfortunately F never quite made it into the company. Some time later Julia, wife of Michael also bought stock in the company and claimed the F for herself. Thereafter F stood for Julia or so she claimed.

Our original product was the FMK Dental system which was marketed very successfully in the West and very strongly in the Northwest through dealers who were given exclusive territories.

Some years later, about the time we were struggling to figure out how to go multiuser on the IBM PC, the company name was changed to Perfect Business Systems and the software to SunRise Dental System. At this point the company had grown considerably and we were now not only doing software development but had been lured into hardware development as well. Our clients, dentists, were clamoring for PC's and we started building clones for them. It wasn't too long until we realized that we desperately needed software to manage this new hardware facet of the business. The dental software could already do a lot of what we needed but didn't have inventory control or serial number tracking which were both vital concerns to us.

So we took the SunRise Dental software and started with it as the foundation for a new business management product which we named PERFECT. It was developed in parallel with SunRise Dental until it was ready for our use and then shortly thereafter it was pressed into service by some of our neighboring businesses. With time the dental business was replaced entirely by PERFECT and PERFECT was further enlarged to accomodate point of sale operations along with all the various specialty hardware. In the mid-90's we decided to add a retail arm to the business under the name of Point of Sale Products. The final part of the story is the name change of PERFECT to PetraSell with its marketing spearhead of PetraLite.

From the intial single user offering of FMK Dental System at $8000 in 1981 to the FREE PetraLite and from the 1981 computer, of 64K (yes I mean K as in kilobyte) RAM and 5 megabyte hard disk, to the multi-megabyte RAM and multi-gigabyte computers of today a lot a water has passed under.

Both F (or is that J) and M of the original FMK group have survived the years and are still here at Point of Sale Products. We just love a happy ending like that. We checked recently and K is still alive and enjoying life in Happy Valley where we left him. Oh, we forgot to mention it but somewhere along the way we ended up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And for those who aren't quite sure: Yes, New Mexico is one of the 50 states of the good old USA.

From the folks at Point of Sale Products

 

 

 
      sutor
    ne  ultra    crepidam  ! 


"cobbler, don't go farther than the shoes" - It is said that greek painter Apelles was one day painting a warrior but he was uncertain on how to render his shoe (crepida); he then asked a cobbler (sutor) and the cobbler explained to him what was required. But, after a while, the cobbler started criticising other parts of the painting too, so Apelles asked him to keep within the borders of his competence.

We, the creators of PetraSell, would hope you find that we have stayed within the bounds of our competence. We also trust you will recognize that the years of meticulous effort have indeed produced a truly fine software product.

Like a fine wine, PetraSell has good age on it now, but unlike wine it has not lain un-attended but has been twiddled and tweaked incessantly year in and year out.

And can we now stand back and say Teleo! - it is finished!  Such a pleasant thought but unless the end of the age should interrupt our work we expect to be found here just plugging away...

 Ad Infinitum