In another blast from the past, I was at a restaurant recently where the waiters used ipads to take the orders. I'm sure they thought they were cutting-edge gen-Zers pushing the boundaries of technology. I shrugged it off. I helped a relative install a computer management system in a restaurant in 1983. Features of the system: orders were taken on handheld tablets with touchscreens which communicated wirelessly with the central system - an IBM PC running DOS 2.0. Orders were printed out in the kitchen on a dot-matrix printer as they were taken, and inventory and book-keeping was adjusted in real time (the cash register was another IBM-PC and connected with the "server" via Novell Netware). This was long before wi-fi and the wireless system was adhoc - We had to run a matrix of antenna wires under the floor and overhead on the outside patio in order to get full coverage.
I should write a book.