A Brief History of the ATM | Hacker News Reader

A Brief History of the ATM

theatlantic.com

16 pointsjgrahamc6 comments

> For instance, they could easily jam or run out of product. They could erroneously dispense several bank notes instead of just one—all without the owner's knowledge.

I think this impresses me the most about ATMs. I've never personally experienced an ATM dispensing incorrectly. In fact, it wasn't till many years and many ATM transactions before it even occurred to me that mistakes could be made.

I presume they don't happen very often because I have no idea what I would do if something did happen? Who do I talk to if it debits 100 from my account but only dispenses 80? What if it's a bank error in my favor? Is it mine to keep?

Unrelated - I now use my phone to deposit checks rather then the ATM. Unrelated 2 - I now use ATMs to do currency exchange rather then dedicated currency shops.

I had an ATM eat a check I tried to deposit once. I contacted the bank and they had me give them the ATM location and date and approximate time of the transaction, along with what I thought should have been the result (debiting N dollars to my account). They debited my account immediately and then investigated. A week or two later I got a letter saying that they'd found the check and the debit would remain on my account.

My guess is that when problems do occur the banks are, generally, very responsive about resolving them because a loss of confidence in ATMs would be rather disastrous for retail banking in general.

I had a much less pleasant experience, when an ATM ate my check. Basically they would send a tech out in 3-6 hours, and retrieve the check, and give it to me. Luckily I lived down the street so that wasn't that big of an inconvenience, and they gave me a call, but I was pretty annoyed.

I started using them in 1979 (sic), Diebolds used by BayBank, a Boston area consumer oriented bank, and in the early-mid 80s had a couple of failures to dispense altogether. The first time it was right at a bank branch, so they extracted it from the machine. 2nd time was at a random mall location and after hours, and I wondered if asking for one more $20 would kick out the ones already dispensed, which it did.

To this day I count all the bills ^_^.

> Who do I talk to if it debits 100 from my account but only dispenses 80?

It happened to me once, sometime circa 1996. I just called the bank the next business day (I think the incident happened on a weekend), and got refunded soon after.

I had an uncle who was involved in the initial rollout of ATMs in the United Kingdom, for one of the major banks here --- Barclays, maybe? He was managerial track rather than engineering, but he'd still tell horror stories about the high-level executive discussions about the fundamental technology.

Seems there were two choices: the one where PINs were held centrally and all ATMs had to be connected to a phone line so they could validate them; or the one where PINs and your balance were stored on the card, which allowed ATMs to be completely disconnected and so be much more flexible (and cheaper).

Luckily they chose the right one.

Also I have heard, but cannot find a reference for right now, that due to a bug they managed to issue a large proportion of the early cards all using the same PIN. This was apparently the best kept secret in banking until they managed to get them all changed. If anyone's heard of this, I'd love to know more about what happened.

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