Cash issuing terminals

My uncle was part of the team in Bank of America implementing new ATM software at the time they moved to somewhat customizing the interface so it had a quick button on the first menu to give you your favourite withdrawal amount quickly, let you choose what notes you wanted etc. He said it was written in java and his favourite bit was writing the method that would be called (after all checks were done to make sure you had the money etc) to issue the cash. It was called “dispenseWithoutQuestion()”.

You could call dispenseWithoutQuestion(someamount) and the device would spit that amount of cash out so it was obviously tremendously pleasing to test.

No mention of Walter Wriston and First National City Bank (later Citicorp)? Wriston is sometimes credited with the concept of networked ATMs, in the sense that he as an executive pushed the project forward.[1] He scaled up the technology, flooding New York City with ATMs. Then everybody else in banking had to install them.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/21/obituaries/walter-b-wrist...

I remember the first ATMs I used back in the late 1970s. They were IBM machines with a red LED display, single-line, in a fairly heavily armoured, tiltable (to take into account people's different heights) slot.

These days we have big, full-colour LCD displays, without armouring. In Lincolnshire UK, where I live thieves just pull the whole ATM out of wall with a (stolen) JCB digger and take it away to be cut open at their leisure. That is if they can find one, of course. For both thief and bank customer ATMs are becoming increasingly rare - though not as rare perhaps as brick-and-mortar bank branches.

This is worth reading for the line "For some reason difficult to divine the radioactive ATM card did not catch on." alone.

In Japan, Omron developed early ATMs that looked similar to American and European machines. Though those early forms have changed significantly over time, Omron remains a top maker today (their ATM division later became a joint venture with Hitachi, so the Omron name is no longer used).

Unlike IBM, Omron specializes in ATM hardware, not bank internal systems. That difference in focus could have mattered.

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