A typical Personal Computer will have at least 512mb of RAM
                         and will operate at a rate of 1ghz or more - its CPU 'cycles'
                         or 'ticks' 1,000,000,000 times per second.
                  
                         In very simple terms, the computer can execute an instruction
                         in 1,000,000,000th of a second.  That's a lot of instructions
                         in a single second. (In reality, each instruction would require
                         several 'ticks'.)
                  
                         A Food-Service POS uses instructions to multiply price times
                         quantity, or to display a customer's name on the screen, and 
                         so on.
                  
                         For example, a table-service system would go through the
                         following steps to place a new order on a table:
                  
                             Get Server Code from operator
                             Get Table Code
                             Get Number of Persons
                             Get items on order - save to disk
                             Print Kitchen/Bar slips according to what's ordered
                  
                         Simple and straightforward. Each step would be translated
                         into several instructions in the working program.
                  
                         How many instructions do you think each step would require?
                         That's hard to say because it would depend on the language
                         used to develop the software.
                  
                         We download demo versions of all of our competitors software
                         to check them out. The following gives you the total size in bytes
                         of the executable program (EXE) for four of our competitors.

                            NextPOS     17,010,688
                            Aldelo      19,148,800
                            Amigo       25,468,928
                            System3     17,502,208
                            Foodman        237,429
       
                  
                         Why are they all so large (except Foodman)? Well, the primary
                         reason is because of the programming language used to develop
                         the software.  Do we really need 25,468,928 'Instructions' for
                         a simple POS system? Well, depending on the chosen language,
                         you sure do.
                  
                         All of the POS vendors use things like Microsoft Jet, SQL,
                         Visual Basic, Java, and so on, which produce notoriously 
                         inefficient and terribly bloated software. This is one of
                         the primary reasons that most POS systems can be buggy and
                         inefficient and large.
                  
                         It stands to reason that a program which is 25,468,928 bytes
                         in size will have a statistically greater likelihood of having
                         serious bugs than one which only requires 237,429 bytes (Foodman).
                         The software will innately be more complex, and dependent upon
                         Microsoft software products like .NET and Jet, etc.
                  
                         None of the languages mentioned are specifically designed
                         to develop simple business applications like POS and are
                         not suitable to the purpose. 
                  
                         Foodman, unlike the others, is written in COBOL which is a 
                         language SPECIFICALLY designed for business applications
                         like POS. COBOL is primarily a mainframe language and is
                         used by large companies, such as utilities, banks, insurance
                         companies and the like for their main applications. The
                         odds are high that your utility bill, phone bill, etc.,
                         are produced using mainframe systems written in COBOL.
                  
                         The primary reason for Foodman's rock-solid dependability
                         is because it is written in COBOL. Microsoft first introduced
                         COBOL for the PC in the early eighties and there are several
                         major companies selling COBOL compilers for the PC, Fujitsu
                         being one of them. 
                  
                         Another advantage to using COBOL is that it is not dependent
                         upon a particular version of Windows. Foodman will run on
                         3.1, 98, 98SE, NT, 2000, XP and Vista.  Foodman will work fine
                         on mixed networks where the PCs use different version of Windows.
                  
                         Download and installation time are also dramatically reduced
                         because of Foodman's small size - the installation EXE is
                         less than 2.5mg versus the multi-megabytes of our competitors.

                         Although a Java programmer might think of COBOL as a dead
                         language, consider the fact that the current investment in COBOL 
                         technologies, staff and hardware, is estimated to be greater 
                         than 5 trillion dollars. Over 180 billion lines of COBOL code 
                         are in use today, with an estimated 5 billion new lines added 
                         per year.  Not dead yet! Nor is it likely to be.