[LINK] First ATM

[Jan Whitaker]

At 08:18 AM 14/12/2006, Howard Lowndes wrote:

>Going back to the UK, they were well before that.

Checking wikipedia:

A mechanical cash dispenser, arguably an ATM, was developed and built 
by Luther George Simjian and installed 1939 in New York by the City 
Bank of New York, but removed after 6 months due to the lack of 
customer acceptance.[1]

Thereafter, the history of ATMs paused for over 25 years, until De La 
Rue developed the first electronic ATM, which was installed first in 
Enfield Town in North London on June 27, 1967 by Barclays Bank. The 
first person to use the machine was Reg Varney of "On the Buses" 
fame, a British Television programme from the 1960s.[2]This instance 
of the invention is credited to John Shepherd-Barron, although Luther 
George Simjian registered patents in New York, USA in the 1930s and 
Donald Wetzel and two other engineers from Docutel registered a 
patent on June 4, 1973. Shepherd-Barron was awarded an OBE in the 
2005 New Year's Honours List[3]

The first ATMs accepted only a single-use token or voucher, which was 
retained by the machine. These worked on various principles including 
radiation and low-coercivity magnetism that was wiped by the card 
reader to make fraud more difficult.[3]

The idea of a personal identification number (PIN) stored on a 
physical card being compared with the PIN entered when retrieving the 
money was developed by the British engineer James Goodfellow in 1965, 
who also holds international patents regarding this technology.[3]

ATMs first came into wide use during the early- to mid-1980s. Notable 
historical models of ATMs include the IBM 3624 and 473x series, 
Diebold TABS 9000 and 10xx series, and NCR 5xxx series.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_teller_machine#History


Jan Whitaker
JLWhitaker Associates, Melbourne Victoria
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
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