ATM Turns 40

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.

From Wikipedia: [wikipedia.org] A mechanical cash dispenser was developed and built by Luther George Simjian and installed 1939 in New York City by the City Bank of New York, but removed after 6 months due to the lack of customer acceptance.

Re:Wrong - Not the "first" ATM.

Yes, the first ATM was invented during medieval times, when they had a midget in a box dispensing gold coins when presented with a certificate of ownership. This was short lived due the midgets dieing frequently and some just being carried off in their boxes and robbed.

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Oh boy, here comes another /. "*WE* invented it first!" pissing contest between the U.S. and Europe. I should bring in my black nationalist friend to chime in with his "It was actually invented by a black man" routine too.

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We all know Al Gore invented the first ATM.

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What's in your wallet?

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Teller_Mach ine [wikipedia.org] A mechanical cash dispenser was developed and built by Luther George Simjian and installed 1939 in New York City by the City Bank of New York, but removed after 6 months due to the lack of customer acc

Good reason not to cite Wikipedia as your source!

From Wikipedia: A mechanical cash dispenser was developed and built by Luther George Simjian and installed 1939 in New York City by the City Bank of New York, but removed after 6 months due to the lack of customer acceptance

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!

And it just goes to prove

That everyone does their best thinking when they're in the bath.

Or on the can.

Re:And it just goes to prove

Which is why I go to the can in the shower. Double the inspiration power. Of course, the wife doesn't like the brown streaks in the tub, but you can't please everyone.

Sexual Reference.

I would have thought people had been ATM'ing for hundreds of years...

Real Innovation

Plastic cards had not been invented, so Mr Shepherd-Barron's machine used cheques that were impregnated with carbon 14, a mildly radioactive substance.... "I later worked out you would have to eat 136,000 such cheques for it to have any effect on you."

Interestingly, this was arguably one of those inventions that is, in retrospect unbelievably obvious, it really has changed the world. It leads me to wonder what Mr Shepherd-Barron was paid for his idea, and if any attempts were made to limit the implementation of this innovative machine to a single company...

Re:Real Innovation

He was actually paid a lot of money, (but sadly he could only withdraw 10 pounds at a time).

so....

What's wrong with turning 40? huh?!?!

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 ;)

A man is only as old as the woman he feels ;)

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"Old age is the greatest surprise in a man's life." --Tolstoy

Asynchronous Transfer Mode?

I should get out more.

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Automated Teller Machine. I think it's an Americanism, though... the first people just called it a cash machine.

I could be totally wrong, though.

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That's the first thing I thought as well. C'mon, this is slashdot. If it says ATM in the title, we sure as heck better be talking about the network protocol. It's news for NERDS.

Protocols?

What protocols do automated teller machines use to communicate with banks? And does anybody have their own schematics for building ATMs? HowStuffWorks has a video that goes inside ATMs [howstuffworks.com] and Wikipedia is informative re: the software aspects [wikipedia.org], but maybe there

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They used to use SNA (LU 6.2 as I recall, but it's been a long time). That was when most ATM's, at least here in the States, ran OS/2 and talked to Mainframes. Now most of them run embedded CE or other OSes, and I'm not sure if they are still using SNA o

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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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My local ATM was never down when they had the old text mode OS/2 version running. They replaced it two years ago with a CE embedded (I think) Diebold machine and that one is down at least once a week.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

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I just don't see any benifit to using Windows or CE for an ATM. Maybe they use Visual Basic to write the code for them... Shuddderr......

Microsoft has a very significant presence in the market for embedded systems. There are customized version of Visual

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A friend worked for Lloyds at the start of the 90s and ATMs were effectively terminals using SNA or X500 pads to mainframes. These days they all seem to use Windows so it's probably all over IP. ATMs in shops can still use ISDN or even good old fashioned m

Mmmm, chocolate...

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?

This is the US right? in the UK they tried to introduce them and suffered a serious consumer revolt. I haven't seen one that charges fees for years. In fact, the first bit of text on the screen of almost all UK ATMS is "you will not be charged for this" su

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Up until about 5 years ago, some major UK banks charged people to use their cash machines if they weren't a customer of that bank. This, predicatably, ended up with those banks charging right back at the first banks customers. After a few rounds of this,

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Well, most ATM cards i've seen give you 3 tries and then the card is disabled. Even if you only have a 3 digit pin, then you only get .3% chance of getting it right by guessing the pin before the card is disabled.

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Hah, that reminds me... When I was much younger, I wondered how the heck there could be only 4 digits in the PIN, since that gives only 10 000 combinations, while there are millions of different cards. There's bound to be a collision! Took me a while befor

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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 a

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The key point you make here is that the PIN is encrypted. There are hardware failsafes too, that prevent people with sophisticated electronics gadgetry from trying to discern a PIN's location in memory on the chip, although people have tried to hack the ca

What a bastard!

I hit upon the idea of a chocolate bar dispenser, but replacing chocolate with cash.

Dammit, I could have had a chocolate bar!

UK not part of World

...anywhere in the world or the UK

Wow I always though the english were a bit different :)

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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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not the English (who are just a small insignificant part of the UK, they can't even rule themselves because of the number of german monarches and welsh or scottish PM's we've had, pathetic people! ;)

There, fixed it for you.

replacing chocolate with cash

replacing chocolate with cash

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.

It should be noted that the ATM of that era wasn't quite what we have today.

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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I do not remember those cards, and I had one of the first accounts offered by Barclays. I do remember that you could go to multiple branches and get a few quid from each as they did not update in real time. A real help for poor students, until the bank man

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I posted it above - but:

Plastic cards had not been invented, so Mr Shepherd-Barron's machine used cheques that were impregnated with carbon 14, a mildly radioactive substance.... "I later worked out you would have to eat 136,000 such cheques for it to have any effect on you."

Although why you'd want to eat your cheques is beyond me, I just tried eating one and it didn't taste so good, maybe its the lack of Carbon 14 in them these days....

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Hmm. Maybe people wanted to eat them because they were hungry and didn't get a chocolate bar??

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Yes, I remember being allowed to take my father's punched card to the bank to get out ten pounds for him when I was ten or so, which would have been 1971. And it was ten pounds in pound notes, neatly folded into a plastic holder. He still has some of the

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The Barclays system wasn't quite the same. From Barclays you got six slips of slightly stiff paper - thinner than normal punched cards but thicker than a cheque. They were about the size of a cheque but with some holes in them. Each of them could be exc

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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.

My uncle was the project manager at Barclays behind the modern magnetic

Size

And I can remember when ATMs took up whole rooms, and only had $1k of cash available! You really had to know your stuff to get anything out of them!

Cute story...

My aunt and Mother were both working at a bank in Houston, TX that got the first ATM in the city (or so the story goes). One was inside the bank working on the internals of the ATM, and the other outside. As the wall was relatively thin, they could talk to each other and work on the problem. Well, after they got done, a customer arrived to use the new and fancy gadget. He began speaking to the ATM and telling it what amount of money he wanted. Always found that story to be funny.

demise of cash?

FTA:

"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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The market size of just pre-paid cards exceed 180 Billion dollars.

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,

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...just like Spam refers to "meat."

Fixed that for you.

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I can tell you that cash (here is the U.S. at least) is no longer anywhere near as ubiquitous as it once was. I rarely even carry the stuff anymore (it's basically only useful for toll booths and vending machines). Even fast food restaurants take debit/cre

Now wait a minute

If you visit the island fortress/abbey of Mont Saint-Michel off the coast of France, one of the first things you see inside the gate is a stone wall built circa 1000 CE with an ATM set into it. So they've obviously been around since William the Conqueror...;-)

rj