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Comment by deadeye | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one here that remembers credit cards before they used any sort of online processing?

Back in the day, paying with a credit card was a hassle. There was a machine that would take an imprint of your card and you would sign the imprint. There was no authorization.

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I worked a retail mall job in the early 90s. We had a computer/POS system that had a built-in swiper for credit cards. You'd swipe, hit a key, then listen to it dial out, connect, beep, etc. A CC payment took minimum 30 seconds, usually closer to a minute. December was always a huge slowdown for cc payments. Occasionally we'd pull out the imprint machine and do a few of those, and... for some reason, I seem to remember we had to use it for amex or diners club or discover or some other 'non-traditional' card, but those were a rarity - I think I may have done 2 or 3 of those a year.

Most places seemed to have 'swipe in the terminal' only by late 90s.

I used to be the one running those cards through the machine! We actually would call someone (credit card processor?) to give them the details and we'd get an auth code back that we wrote down.

I worked in a gas station taking credit cards w/ an imprint machine. We had a book, updated monthly, of card numbers to decline. That was in 1990. By 1994 we were calling a toll free number and reading (part of?) the account number for authorization.

I’m curious to know when exactly that practice ended in Western Europe and North America. As a millennial, the only time I ever encountered it was in 2008 in an outdoor shop in Thamel, Kathmandu’s backpacker ghetto. The owners said that they could not accept my Visa Electron card (standard European debit card) because it was not a real credit card, and they showed me the machine they used to take imprints of real credit cards. Of course, this was all gone by my next visit to Nepal a couple of years later.

I remember doing the authorisation by phoning up a Streamline who would give you an authorisation code to put on the credit card form. I worked for Electronics Boutique and we couldn't give the games out without the code

I'm of that vintage of credit card user that remembers this. I used to keep my counterfoils (I think that's what they were called) to reconcile what was remaining on my available credit. I seem to remember there was a printed list of that some merchants used to look up invalidated cards before electronic terminals replaced mechanical card swipe machines.

I remember my parents credit card bill coming in on punched cards - would have been the mid 70's. Ha!

If the amount was big enough, there would be a phone call from the merchant to some call center.

The authorization was the clerk picked up the phone and dialed the credit card company.

No, but you may not have read the article ;).

It was called a 'kerchunk machine', - which is a fun onomatopoeic - and the article does mention it.

I only know this because of the scene from Home Alone 2.

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