Top 10 Inventions in Money Technology During the 1900's

scuggums writes "The DaVinci Institute has put together an interesting historic piece to help put the world of money technology into perspective. While I'm glad to see the ATM machine made the list, I had no idea it was invented back in 1939. Other items on the list are barcodes, spreadsheets, and RSA encryption. This looks to be one of the research pieces the Institute's doing for their upcoming Future of Money Summit in October."

Comments

Plastic money

[questamor]

Another one worth mentioning, Plastic money as used in several countries now, starting as a collaboration between a couple of countries using technology developed in Australia. It's a late 80s thing and only fairly recent, but something upwards of 30 nations use last I looked.

Re:Excuse me, but

[rynthetyn]

what exactly does a "smart card" have to do with money technology?

You must be an American--in much of Europe, all of the credit cards are smart cards. When I was in Spain about 3 years ago, I couldn't use my credit card to make pay phone calls because the phones were all equipped with smart card readers and couldn't read my American credit card with only a mag strip.

Re:VisiCalc w/o Apple?

[MoThugz]

Mods... have a clue, this is not a Mac-centric article...

The article states "Electronic Spreadsheet", not specifically VisiCalc.

But since you want to make this a Mac issue... From the article:

The market for electronic spreadsheet software was growing rapidly in the early 1980s and VisiCalc stakeholders were slow to respond to the introduction of the IBM PC that used an Intel computer chip. Beginning in September 1983, legal conflicts between VisiCorp and Software Arts distracted the VisiCalc developers, Bricklin and Frankston. During this period, Mitch Kapor developed Lotus and his spreadsheet program quickly became the new industry spreadsheet standard.

<flamesuit class="on">
Wow... the Mac was dying since 1980?
</flamesuit>

Re:Smart card?

[stephanruby]

"Here we use credit cards. Its more secure to have financial information stored server-side."

I guess you don't have a checking account. Here in the US it takes one to five days to get checks reconciled. So even if you don't ever use your checkbook. The very fact that you have a checking account puts you at risk from having your account cleaned out.

In some ways, smart cards are just like checks, they don't get reconciled immediately, but they can get reconciled within a few seconds if necessary.

Re:Excuse me, but

[swillden]

I have a chip like that on my PSU ID and despite being only about a year old it sporadically decides not to work.

Stop sporadically sticking it in the slot backwards!

Seriously, I work with smart cards and I find your statement very hard to believe. Unless the contacts on your chip are really filthy and prevent the reader from getting a good connection, the chip will either work or not. I suppose it's possible that some really stupid software on the chip occasionally goes into a bad state (and then somehow recovers???) but given that a chip essentially "reboots" every time it's inserted in a reader, that would have to be some really bad software.

On further reflection, one other possibility does occur to me: If the contact plate has partially broken loose from the chip underneath, it could be that it's only making contact intermittently. I've never seen a chip do this, though; usually if you manage to break the leads, they're broken and will *never* make contact.

In any case, what you're experiencing is very uncommon. I recommend breaking the chip so that it *never* functions and then taking it in and complaining so that they give you a replacement. You can break it pretty easily if you place your thumbnails on the contact plate and crease it sharply. You can also shatter the chip by placing it on a hard surface (concrete works well) and hitting it hard with a hammer.

Electronic Cash Registers

[Detritus]

Electronic, as opposed to electrical, cash registers did not appear until cheap microprocessors became available. The older registers were mechanical or electro-mechanical. It was the age of the precision machine. Calculators, cash registers, typewriters and teletypes were mechanical devices with large numbers of parts. National Cash Register was the dominant company in the cash register business.

I can remember going to the department store with my mother back in that era. The department store used special models of cash registers that were huge and had many more buttons than a normal cash register. They also had a pneumatic tube system to send paperwork from one department to another.