It also meant that IBM couldn’t benefit directly from its magnetic stripe inventions. That meant that anybody could use their magnetic stripe credit or debit card anywhere in the world. standard in 1969 and an international standard two years later. Working with the banking and airlines industries, IBM helped develop the approach that was adopted as a U.S. Even more important was the effort by IBM and other leaders of electronic payments to create open compatibility standards. The story of the magnetic stripe isn’t just about the ingenuity of the technology. IBM became a pioneer in magnetic stripe technology. When he mentioned his problem to his wife, who happened to be ironing clothing at the time, she suggested that he use the iron to essentially melt the strip on.
Magnetic stripe card reader software how it works how to#
The story goes that he wanted to combine a strip of magnetized tape with a plastic identity card for officials of the CIA, and he couldn’t figure out how to do it. The first person to affix magnetic media to a plastic card for data storage was IBM engineer Forrest Parry. It is really inexpensive to issue mag stripe cards, and nowadays the point-of-sale technology for reading mag stripes has been perfected and benefits from economies of learning and scale.” Paying With Plastic: The Digital Revolution in Buying and Borrowing. “Why has the mag stripe proved so resilient?” writes David S. The technology is now commonplace on ID cards, drivers’ licenses, security control cards and ATM cards.
Initially used on transit tickets for the London underground and California’s Bay Area Rapid Transit system, the magnetic stripe enabled a person’s identifying information to be logged and transmitted immediately, securely and accurately. The magnetic stripe, when combined with point-of-sale devices, data networks and transaction-processing computers, was the catalyst that accelerated the proliferation of the global credit card industry, which now handles US$6 trillion in transactions per year. The system was insecure, slow and prone to error. One of those sheets was then sent to a processing center, where a harried clerk would type the account and sales information into a computing system. Each one was recorded by using what was essentially a tiny printing press to imprint the raised letters and numbers from a card onto a two-sheet, pressure-sensitive paper form. As recently as the early 1970s, credit-card transactions were more physical than digital.