ATM Turns 40 210
01100111 writes "The world's first ATM was installed in a branch of Barclays in Enfield, north London, 40 years ago this week.
Inspiration had struck Mr Shepherd-Barron, now 82, while he was in the bath. The machine paid out a maximum of £10 a time." It struck me there must be a way I could get my own money, anywhere in the world or the UK. I hit upon the idea of a chocolate bar dispenser, but replacing chocolate with cash.""
Wrong - Not the "first" ATM. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Wrong - Not the "first" ATM. (Score:5, Funny)
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This doesn't tell me much.
Did you buy tokens and get cash in return?
This is still in the era of pen and paper and - perhaps in New York - punch-card accounting.
In 1939 a trip to the bank usually implied a significant transaction - your monthly mortgage payment, for example, or a cash withdrawal to
Good reason not to cite Wikipedia as your source! (Score:5, Informative)
A good example of why not to cite Wikipedia as your source -- I followed your link when I read your comment (1830BST 25June2007), and there was no sign of Simjian or the Bank of New York on the page. But the page did list the invention by John Shepherd-Barron, which is the one you are disputing! I suspect many other readers had a similar experience. So either you were making mischief, in which case you've been found out, or it's changed since you cited in, in which case that'll teach you not to cite a publically editable source!
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And it just goes to prove (Score:5, Funny)
Or on the can.
Re:And it just goes to prove (Score:4, Funny)
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Sexual Reference. (Score:3, Funny)
Real Innovation (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Real Innovation (Score:5, Funny)
so.... (Score:2)
Yep, I was born the same year. Thanks for the reminder.
But, I hold on to the adage, "Men look as old as they feel. Women look as old as they are...."
Alternately ;) (Score:5, Funny)
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Asynchronous Transfer Mode? (Score:5, Funny)
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I could be totally wrong, though.
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Probably a bit redundant to call it an 'automated machine'. Cue complaints about withdrawing '$100 dollars' from the 'ATM machine' using your 'PIN number' etc...
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Protocols? (Score:2)
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I believe they began switching them to IP; I seem to recall they were doing it using VPN tunnelling over the internet. It raised quite a few "wtf?" style comments.
They've also used X.25 before now.
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If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
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Microsoft has a very significant presence in the market for embedded systems. There are customized version of Visual Studio. You are not limited to Visual Basic. WindowsEmbedded [microsoft.com]
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IBM is pushing Linux right now but even discounting Linux they have AIX. Banks are comfortable with IBM on ATMs. They used OS/2 didn't they? So again why not AIX or Linux.
Dumb management just doesn't make sense. There has to be a reason.
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But maybe the OS/2 system did break down once and there was no way to repair such an old machine (maybe the heat sink on the CPU came loose one day and it fried itself and they don't make chips for that socket anymore), so they had to bring a new machine in, and it was more trouble to make the old software run on it than upgrade to new software. And maybe the old system had an exploit in its old and discontinued code base that wasn't going to be patched.
If you can't fix it,
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I'd like to believe it's all secured and encrypted thoroughly, and transported over a network with no physical connection to the Internet. However, I've been told (don't know how accurate it is, so take with as much salt as you think it needs) that at least one country's banks have used plain, unsecured telephone lines.
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Mmmm, chocolate... (Score:3, Insightful)
I wouldn't mind the service fees so much if it dispensed chocolate bars with my money.
Anyway, FTA: "Mr Shepherd-Barron came up with the idea when he realised that he could remember his six-figure army number. But he decided to check that with his wife, Caroline. 'Over the kitchen table, she said she could only remember four figures, so because of her, four figures became the world standard,' he laughs." This is a great example of how simple, even mundane decision processes can affect millions, even billions of people. Imagine if he'd stayed with six digits, and people felt it was too hard? Or if he had gone with three, and everyone's account was easily hacked (relatively speaking)?
You still have service fees? (Score:2)
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Try going to any motorway service station, or any ATM inside a convenience (corner) shop.
And I agree with you, service fees on ATMs are disgusting. Banks make many billions/year, and their greed knows no bounds.
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The ATMs that charge now tend to be owned by 3rd party companies, rather than the banks themselves - they put them in convenience stores
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Try going to any motorway service station, or any ATM inside a convenience (corner) shop.
I had an odd experience on this front recently. I was driving a school minibus and the boys asked to stop to get some fast food. We stopped at a shopping area (not sure what else to call it) on the outskirts of Reading, and the boys rushed to use the cash machines before going for burgers. I stopped to read the notices on the 3 machines (which was more than the boys did). The middle machine of the three had a notice saying, "This machine will not charge", but the other two had much smaller notices sayi
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I've used three banks in my years of having bank accounts.
Wellsfargo, Bank of Kirksville, and USBank.
Not one of the three charged for use of their ATM's. If I used the ATM of a bank I did not have an account at, there was usually a $1.
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Although that was probably more in the 80s.
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Not many people in England had phones at the time, so the namespace for phone numbers only required four digits. *please mod flamebait, please mod flamebait*
Too close to the truth for flamebait. Although plenty of people had phones, Subscriber Trunk Dialling (STD -- another ambiguous TLA!) was very far from widespread, so most calls went through an operator and the "number" would consist of an exchange name and the number on that exchange (my parents' number was "Penketh 5425"; I assume that the "Pennsylvania 65000" system in the USA was similar, although if the Glen Miller Orchestra is to be trusted the USA had bigger exchanges). And yes, the system did put a
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In short - don't worry too much about the PIN number being on the card. You have other things to worry about if your card is in some
What a bastard! (Score:2, Funny)
UK not part of World (Score:5, Funny)
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Written for an American audience perhaps, where America is the world, and ships fall off the edge of US territorial waters.
Just to underline the fact that the UK isn't quite yet the 51st state.
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There, fixed it for you.
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I find it amusing that Sky One was showing Braveheart on the day that Gordon Brown became leader of the Labour party.
Okay, that's enough off-topic posts from me today.
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replacing chocolate with cash (Score:2)
And he got that idea when he stopped trying to stay on his wife's good side and go for hookers instead.
Not quite the same as today's ATMs. (Score:5, Informative)
Instead of having a card with a magnetic stripe which you would get back after the transaction it was a small, plastic coated punched card which would be swallowed by the machine and then sent back to the account holder afterwards. In other words, it was an emergency "I need £10 of cash" card.
I remember my Dad having one of these from the National Westminster Bank circa 1972. ATMs didn't really take off until the magnetic stripe cards came out in the late '70s/ early '80s.
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The process was as follows:
You first typed in your six digit PIN. This caused the drawer in the centre of the machine to unlock and open a little.
Then you pulled open the drawer fully and positioned your slip on som
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My uncle was the project manager at Barclays behind the modern magnetic-stripe ATM project (I don't know if he was involved with these early prototypes). He used to tell all kinds of fascinating stories about trying the herd the vast numbers of people involved into moving in at least approximately in the right direction.
One
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I got a hamburger from the 1st ATM I used (Score:2, Funny)
I ate WAY too many burgers during that promo.
Size (Score:2)
Cute story... (Score:5, Funny)
demise of cash? (Score:3, Interesting)
"Money costs money to transport. I am therefore predicting the demise of cash within three to five years."
Haven't we heard that before? Like, 20 years ago? Seems that cash is just as prevalent as it always was. I just got back from a vacation to the UK and loved the fact that I could use my debit card to withdraw cash without getting socked with a 3% 'foreign transaction fee' that comes with credit card purchases (rather, there was a $1.50 flat fee from my bank for every withdrawal - so for 200 UKP, or about $400 with today's exchange rate, that's about 0.37%). Along with the fact that *everyone* accepts cash, including that remote pub in Nowhere, Scotland, I don't see cash going away any time soon. Yay cash.
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Americans hold 2.6 Billion credit cards in their wallets.
As of June 2007, more than 50.5% americans pay their bills by card.
Websites like amazon accept only cards, not cash.
And increasingly, even grocers who typically make sale of items less than $25 have begun to accept contactless cards as means of payment.
Although none of these will replace cash ever, the incentive for totalitarian governments (like our Cheney-led US) to track even the las
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That's a BIG wallet!
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Fixed that for you.
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It would have been very hard to live without cash twenty years ago, or even ten. Now it's a given.
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[1] This has only happened to me in Utah, but apparently it happens in
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Imagine if all fees went away, for both seller/buyer. Imagine there was a small little latch on your credit card that would allow payment, but would signal `anonymous' transaction (ie: it would show up as "CASH" in all statements, on both ends---and all other identifying records of it would be erased [by law] after 3 day clearing period).
Banks could still make money just by the fact of not having to deal with cash and armored
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who invented the BSOD .. (Score:2)
http://blog.eponymous.org/pics/atm1.jpg [eponymous.org]
http://www.oss.cayey.upr.edu/blogs/tecno4all/wp-c
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The pic came out blurry, but the text was:
No idea why a power outage would cause hal.dll to disappear, but then again...Windows f
Now wait a minute (Score:5, Funny)
rj
First ATM I used was 50% chance (Score:2)
There was only the one machine, of course, and that was long before they were networked so that you could go to another bank's machine. So if you got lucky late at night, you could get the green stuff. Otherwise, it was borrow from a friend.
I also seem to recall a little plastic cash holder that the money cam
robot (Score:2)
I never found much of that phrase around though.
Anyone else hear that?
Question: Patented by...? (Score:2, Interesting)
I ask b/c I once worked with an inventor who showed me blueprints and a bona fide patent for what he considered to be (one of?) the first ATM(s).
it was all a dream (Score:2)
Over-romanticized (Score:2)
The subtext to the above seems to be that this "invention" was some kind of genius. I disagree; this is an obvious and straightforward usage of technology that would have been "invented" by a hundred other people within the span of a few years had
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The ATM like most inventions is both a social and a technical problem. It has to be understood and trusted by the customer, it has to be understood and trusted by the bank.
The solution to the problem is not a trivial achievement.
The Japanese, of course, perfected it. (Score:2)
Back in the early 90's even I was able to:
- Deposit and withdraw any amount down to units of 10 yen. Obviously coins as well as bills.
- Carry out electronic transfers to any payee at any other bank. (Transferred the down payment on my car to the Toyota dealership this way)
- Update bank books. (Common now, but it took until 5 years ago for my local ATMs to be able to do this.
The downside was the ATMs closed at