"chris harrison" wrote in message
.. .

I wish we still had the SWT machines on the stations I seem to use,
they've been mostly replaced by whizzy screen-based ones which are
demonstrably slower than the crawled-from-the-80s versions.

Although have some advantages (more stations, payment by plastic) speed
is not one of them.

Much of the reduction in speed comes from the supposedly improved printers
that these machines use. It's the same problem as in supermarkets, where the
latest POS systems seem noticeably slower than their predecessors.