Slashdot Mirror
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.""
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)?
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
It would have been very hard to live without cash twenty years ago, or even ten. Now it's a given.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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 particular thing he talked about was the endless bickering between the connected-ATM faction (where the secret was stored centrally, and all ATMs communicated constantly with central servers via the phone line) and the disconnected-ATM faction (where the secret was stored on the card, and ATMs would only get updated at intervals). Needless to say, and thankfully, the connected-ATM faction won. It seems such an obvious decision these days...
As long as there's a war on drugs, cash isn't going anywhere.
Oppressing an entire population is never cheap.
--Jeckler (/. Beta IS GARBAGE!)
Exactly. Don't quote Wikipedia. Instead quote the source used in Wikipedia and never mention Wikipedia at all. There's some stupid people here, and they will automatically assume that any information they don't like from Wikipedia was obviously something inserted by some kid and can't be correct. If you used the article from MIT that was used as a source in the Wikipedia article, you probably wouldn't have received those troll votes.
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