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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.""
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.
That everyone does their best thinking when they're in the bath.
Or on the can.
Summation 2
I would have thought people had been ATM'ing for hundreds of years...
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...."
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
I should get out more.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
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 and Wikipedia is informative re: the software aspects, but maybe there is more information out there?
It is noted that the ephebian Expression of Eureka has been translated as "bring me a towel"
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)?
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A man is only as old as the woman he feels ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
...anywhere in the world or the UK Wow I always though the english were a bit differentreplacing 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.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
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.
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
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" such was the backlash.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
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!
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.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
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.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
http://daimyo.org/node/44o ntent/atmBSOD.jpg
http://blog.eponymous.org/pics/atm1.jpg
http://www.oss.cayey.upr.edu/blogs/tecno4all/wp-c
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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
The first ATM I used was with Rainier Bank in 1978 in Bremerton, WA. It was so unreliable that I had to have a backup plan if I really needed money -- it was no better than a 50/50 shot of getting cash.
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 came in. That seems ridiculous nowadays, of course, but still that is what sticks in my mind.
I read years ago, I think in scholostic or something, that they called them "bank robots".
I never found much of that phrase around though.
Anyone else hear that?
Why don't you guys have friends or journals?
the first people just called it a cash machine.
:-P
When I first came across these devices (~1970), I immediately started calling them "Fraudpoints".
I think I was ahead of my time...
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).
/.'s Psychic-in-Residence: Psychic to the Geeks
ATM! ATM! There's no place like home, there's no place like home...
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
The Wendy's Hanburger chain was just opening in town and they had a promotion with the bank I used. Use the ATM and bring in your receipt for a free hamburger. I started transferring $1 from my checking to my savings and back just to get a free burger. Then I discovered that these ATMs used a pressure feed printer rather than a sproket feed one and that if I pulled quickly enough on the receipt as it was being printed, I could get several receipts at once.
I ate WAY too many burgers during that promo.
Without the 2nd Amendment, the others are just suggestions.
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 not someone else first done it.
And the detail about replacing chocolate bars with cash just rings of the same mindset that has lead to so many patents of similarly obvious things, like "selling goods and services... OVER THE INTERNET! The idea came to me when I realized in a flash of inspiration that people could use the internet to communicate their desired purchases." What'll they think of next, phones that have a built-in organizer?? What an age we live in...
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Frankly I'm happy with ATMs. They have been a cost driver for all of the banking industry, pushing up fees, enabling mass layoffs of once professional jobs. Now banking is as comfortable as going to McDonalds -- and leaves that same taste in your mouth. Technology is great.
Whenever I'm in a game of DOTA, people would always call me an ATM.
but i'm actually turning 46 in august.
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!
The ATMS (or ABMs) in North America at least are painfully limited compared the the ATMS in Japan.
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 5:00pm, Just 2 hours after the banks closed at 3:00pm. It was quite the event when CITIbank opened the first 24-hour ATM in Tokyo.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/simjian.html
Simjian was Turkish, not American and not British. Read the very article to which you linked (http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/simjian.html)
Some (many) /.ers have yet to discover this, but the quest is worthwhile.
Pining for the fjords
What's your point? Who said he was American or British? His version of the ATM was first tried in America, but I don't see where anyone claimed it was invented by an American.
Although why you'd want to eat your cheques is beyond me
:-)
Well, if they contain excess carbon-14 (all paper contains some!) then one reason would be to utterly confuse future archaeologists when they dig up your remains and attempt to carbon date them
I guess it's not more foolish than 56 bytess...
I hear ATM is really popular with CowboyKneel and whatever Slashdot Lunix fanboi he is banging this week.
ATM owners don't charge users fees here in Australia, but nearly every bank will charge you $1.50 for using another bank's ATM to access your account.
Back in the late 80s/early 90s this was a well-known scam for Aussie & Kiwi backpackers in the UK. Because the cash machines never synched, people would, on the night before they left the UK for good, run around to every ATM they could find, load up on cash, and catch the next flight out. Nice way to finance a year's backpacking home to the Antipodes.