Pyramid Computer Brand Guidelines: The 1985 Freiburg PC Builder Behind Polytouch Kiosks

From assembled desktops to a design award.

Pyramid Computer began in Freiburg im Breisgau, in south-west Germany, in 1985. German Wikipedia says Friedrich Hansen founded it that year, and that in 1986 the present Pyramid Computer GmbH was formed with further partners: Nikolaus Hensler, Markus Müller and Christian Pogoda. At first the business imported components and assembled Apple II and IBM XT-compatible computers, which it sold to private buyers and companies across West Germany.

Growth was quick. By 1987, German Wikipedia says, the firm had more than 30 employees, and by 1989, in a newly built headquarters with about 2,500 square metres of offices, storage and production space, more than 50. In 1991 the business weekly Wirtschaftswoche named it in its entrepreneur-of-the-year awards, and the same year its WaveLine desktop-computer range won an iF Design Award, in a year when the award also went to NeXT Computer Europe. After buying CD Computer & Datentechnik, the company built more than 10,000 computer systems in a single year for the first time in 1994. Between 1992 and 1997 it set up subsidiaries in other fields, from business software and telephone exchanges to memory modules and merchandising.

Hansen and Hensler ran the company together for 34 years, German Wikipedia says. In 2019 Josef Schneider took over day-to-day management, joined in 2021 by Stefan Brückner. The company says it has been building hardware for more than 40 years.

Servers, industrial PCs and then polytouch.

Around 2000 the desktop market changed. German Wikipedia says that as electronics chains and discounters pushed into PC sales, Pyramid moved away from consumer desktops towards standard and made-to-order hardware for networking, industrial PCs and machine vision. In 1998 it had shown BenHur, a Linux-based communications server; in 2004 it supplied the hardware for genugate, a firewall made by the security firm genua; and in 2008 it helped build ATLAS, a computing cluster for the Albert Einstein Institute in Hannover that was used for research on gravitational waves. The state of Baden-Württemberg gave the company its innovation prize at the turn of the century, and Freiburg gave it a local innovation award in 2002.

Kiosks came next. From 2007, German Wikipedia says, Pyramid worked with 3M and the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering in Stuttgart on projected-capacitive touchscreens and on-screen interfaces. The first in-house polytouch device was shown in 2011, taking multi-touch screens of that type from about 20 inches to as much as 42. The company found early kiosk customers in the United Kingdom, with Marks & Spencer, and in the United States, with the AMC cinema chain. German Wikipedia adds that McDonald’s is a major partner, with several tens of thousands of Pyramid kiosk systems in its restaurants around the world.

In September 2019 Kiosk Marketplace reported the launch of the polytouch 32 PE4000, which Pyramid called the world’s first system to put four self-service kiosks on one pedestal: four 32-inch touchscreens, each with its own Intel-based PC, around a central column of continuously cast aluminium, aimed at quick-service restaurants, cinemas and airports. The same report said Pyramid had produced more than 30,000 polytouch terminals over the previous six years, and that AMC and Cinemark used them in the United States for self-ordering, self-checkout and ticket printing. German Wikipedia lists a European Product Design Award in the kiosk category in 2020.

Self-service hardware.

Self-service kiosk makers sell machines that most people meet without ever learning who built them. The tall touchscreen totem in a fast-food restaurant, the check-in unit in a hotel lobby or an airport hall, the ticket machine at a station and the self-checkout lane in a shop usually carry the name of the restaurant, hotel or retailer, not the maker. Acrelec’s own range, for example, is named by screen size and use, from a 22-inch counter-top unit to 27-inch floor-standing and outdoor kiosks.

So the makers present themselves to buyers rather than to the public. Their websites lead with markets — restaurants, retail, hospitality, healthcare, transport, government — and with the parts of a job they can take on: enclosure design, payment terminals and receipt printers, cash handling, software, installation, remote monitoring and field service. Counts of installed machines and the quality and environmental standards they say they are certified to are common, and are given here only as each company states them.

Trade fairs are where the products are shown. Retail-technology shows such as the National Retail Federation’s Big Show in New York and EuroShop in Düsseldorf draw kiosk and self-checkout makers alongside point-of-sale suppliers, and the trade title Kiosk Marketplace promotes an automated-retail and kiosk show of its own in Miami Beach. Trade titles such as Kiosk Marketplace and QSR Web also report the makers’ acquisitions and moves.

The companies in this group range from founder-built firms in France, Portugal, Germany and the United States to subsidiaries of larger Asian technology groups. This guide sets out what can be checked about each — who founded it, who owns it now and what it says about where its kiosks are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From founder-owned firm to listed group.

The founders sold in stages. In November 2020 the law firm Heuking Kühn Lüer Wojtek announced that it was advising mic AG, a company listed in the Scale segment of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, on the takeover of Pyramid Computer GmbH, which mic would make its main business; the plan was to buy 52 per cent of the shares first and the remaining 48 per cent later. German Wikipedia says the founders’ shares passed to mic AG in 2021.

The parent then took the subsidiary’s name. The holding company says it was rebranded as Pyramid AG in 2022; its press releases are datelined Munich, and it describes Pyramid Computer GmbH as its wholly owned operating company. The group sells under the brands POLYTOUCH, for point-of-sale and kiosk terminals, FAYTECH, for touch solutions, AKHET and RNT. Pyramid Computer’s own website groups its kiosks under self-ordering, self-checkout and self-check-in, alongside servers, industrial PCs and touch monitors.

On where the products are made, German Wikipedia says the company keeps its head office in Freiburg and runs a production and logistics centre at Ichtershausen, near Erfurt, in Thuringia. Pyramid AG says its products are “Designed by Pyramid” and produced in Germany; that is the company’s own description.

For a design guide, Pyramid Computer shows how a PC assembler that won a design award for its desktops in 1991 carried that hardware discipline into large touchscreen kiosks, with an aluminium pedestal and a product name, polytouch, that says what the machine does. Compare Acrelec, another European kiosk maker, and Partteam & Oemkiosks. For this guide we use a night ink, a deep blue and an aluminium grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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