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Can Your ATM Play Beethoven?

Posted by timothy on from the you-have-nothing-to-fear dept.

bpiltz writes "A funk band in Harrisonburg, VA, called Midnight Spaghetti, has posted a story with photos about a newly installed Diebold Opteva 520 ATM at Carnegie Mellon University that crashed, then rebooted. The Windows XP operating system initialized without the actual ATM software. The result was a public desktop computer, with only a touch screen interface, left wide open for the amusement of the students at the most wired university in the U.S. Interestingly, Diebold is one of the leading manufacturers of e-voting machines."

2 of 657 comments (clear)

  1. Re:ATM OS diversity by zeitgeist77 · · Score: 5, Informative

    I work at a credit union, and we use OS/2 ATMs. They tried to foist a windows ATM on us, but couldnt get it to work because the tech was too dumb to tell the difference between a D911 (BiSync) and a D912 (LAN). Quite humorous, I played dumb till after he decided to install the OS2 version and then i pointed out to him it was a D912.

    Funny side note though, on all our ATMs, the terminal driver (computer) has its own display on the backside of the unit along with a mouse and keyboard. Of course, we arent using the graphics capabilities because our terminal processor is hmm...slightly older than time.

    So useful facts to be noted from experience:

    1) Diebold techs do not know their rectums from a serial card. (Ive had to carefully hold their hands through IP setup and assigning the correct host:port combo to attach to the terminal processor)

    2) Ive never seen an OS2 atm crash, nor have I ever seen it fail to boot the TCS (Terminal control software).

    3) Windows driven ATMs have to the stupidist idea ive ever heard of, but cant really use linux...(see point one about said sub-sentient techs.)

    4) I fear a world with diebold designed and serviced windows based voting devices. the havoc...the horror....

  2. Re:Stupid Student's or maybe.. by degauss · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually.. I am one of the students that was messing with this machine..

    The reason why I'm sure we didn't empty the machine of all its cash (asside from that whole breaking the law thing), is that there was no way to access the money-dispensing mechanism from the controls we had access to (read: only from the touchscreen)

    The numberpad was totally useless, as windows didn't recognize it, and the character map is pretty slow for trying to actually do anything useful..

    But we had a ton of fun with it anyway.

    --


    CoyboyNeal is God