Exactly like that most likely, I am old enough to remember those machines where credit cards left their mark on the receipt, that is why their numbers are higher than the card.
What’s fascinating (apart from the sound those things made is still in my head) is that the very nature of the technology meant who could and could not get credit varied. At first (1950 diners card onwards) only well off could use it at limited establishments (ie restaurants) and they would postal deliver lists of cars - initially white lists of valid card owners and later hot lists of delinquent card owners. Stick your privacy issues in the restaurant food bin there!
Calling a call centre to verify every transaction is too expensive so only purchases over certain limits came in following BofA/Visa - and that stated that way till the late eighties when larger stores started using back office to talk to Visa network etc. but even so the ability to do live updates and verification was too much and there were weird cacheing tricks
So banks could easily approve or be liable for transactions they would prefer not to approve - so they only gave credit to the rich at first, and then to those who paid back regularly. This info was shared and became credit reference agencies - because the credit card companies shared it initially like casinos but the abuse and mistakes brought legislation
I think what i am saying is our consumer credit culture was not designed, it just grew.
I think it was normal that you had to show ID that matched the card name, and compare the signatures too. Now the signatures are just a spot to draw something funny.
In the 80s and 90s in the UK you just signed. The card imprint was embossed by the machine which put it onto the carbon, and that was sent off to the bank for payment later in the week, like cheques.
I last used a carbon credit card in the early 00s. Electronic swipe and sign for a credit card had gone pretty much everywhere I went except the US by about 2010
My employer in the UK had a machine in around 2014, but it was only used for sales of their own products to employees.
It put all the transaction risk onto the employer, and had a high fee per-use, but since they only had these 'stock clearance' sales to employees once a year it was fine.
When I was working retail (almost 20 years ago :[ ) we imprinted more often because of a failed magstripe, than a computer outage. In the event the card couldn't be swiped, you could key the number in, but the printer would create an extra-long signature slip instead of the normal kind, and we'd imprint the card onto it, as proof the actual card was there. This was I assume to prevent us from having to pay a higher 'card not present' interchange fee, and in terms of fraud, made it really obvious if someone was doing something shady like typing in card numbers without the card or cardholder being present.
We did sailing charters growing up and had one of these on the boat, I was in charge of it and the sound & feel of the CH-CHUNK is seared into my memories like nothing else. We never got any declines, but I always wondered how that reconciliation process actually worked out.
We never got any declines, but I always wondered how that reconciliation process actually worked out.
IIRC, the merchant gets paid if hitting a credit limit or similar decline reason. The card holder then gets hit with a financial penalty (usurious interest rates, or extra charges). If the card has been stolen, it ends up in a big phonebook-like book for offline use (otherwise the merchant just called it in for big purchases).
I remember buying books at a shop in Denver in the late 80s and watching the proprietor look to see if my card was in the big book of stolen credit cards numbers before he ran my card through the kachunka machine.
You didn't get any declines because you didn't ask for any approvals :)
If you mean chargebacks: I believe imprinters had card issuer liability for the longest time, at least as long as the transaction was under the (network-defined) "floor limit".
So if these were relatively low value transactions, the bank would simply not have any standing to decline payment.
When I got my first account to accept credit cards in the 90s, they sent me a kachunka machine along with a bunch of window stickers, all of which were kind of silly since it was for a magazine and I almost never took payments in person (it was also a challenge to persuade banks that the fraud risk was low since magazine subscriptions required a stable mailing address over the course of a year—as it turned out, the only instance of fraud I ever had was a subscription plus back issue order sent to Hungary—still kind of weird to think someone would engage in crime to get issues of a magazine about typography).
In the 90s through political turmoil in the Balkans (former Yugoslavia, so perhaps Hungary which borders it to the North was similar), it was impossible for young adults to acquire a payment instrument that worked online (even my dad had a tough job getting a Visa card: you had to deposit something like 500 Deutsche Marks for a limit of 200 DMs, which was like 50x monthly salary, and only one or two banks issued them). Thus, lists of stolen credit cards were circulating online after 1995 when we got dial-up internet into homes (it was only in Unis before that).
If you had any interest in any topic you read about on the web or in a book, that was the only way to get things even if you had the money otherwise.
Yes, it is quite thoroughly defunct. Back issues show up at high prices at specialty bookshops occasionally. I offered what I had in the basement a few years back at a discount and what was left at the end of the summer went into the recycling bin, so a lot is truly rare. I’m not sure I even have a complete set myself.
In the backlog of my things to do is a best-of compilation of articles from the published (and one planned but unpublished) issues.
Just because an imprinter was used doesn't mean the transaction was necessarily "offline". Depending on merchant's policy, the cashier would call their processor, give them some transaction details and receive an auth code for the transaction which would be written on the imprinted ticket, thus authorizing the transaction at the POS just the same way it's done today (except with humans and phones, instead of an electronic handshake).
Given that GP was the one doing the imprinting, I believe they'd have remembered having done a phone call to a processor or card network on a sailboat :)
I think there was a limit of something like 60 days. At least my bank apparently refused all transactions that were settled too late.
I had a job which involved a lot of taxi trips, and when I cross checked 30% of the trips where never charged my account. I suppose they just filled up the glove box with old slips until they couldn't shut it. Hotels never failed.
In Canada, taxi drivers could be charged horrendous fees for these transactions so sometimes you’d see the charge coming through some random convenience store
My company had them on-hand until around 2021, when I told everyone to throw them out. They'd last been used - at one location, during a complete POS meltdown (I don't miss Aloha at all) - in maybe 2018? No one could remember a previous time.
I'm trying to think the last time I saw one in use, last year or a couple years ago when there were large scale power outages. Of course the newer cards lack raised digits so I'm not sure how well they worked for keeping business moving. I had cash.
As I recall, the slips do have a spot where you can just write the numbers down. But widespread lack of raised numbers makes them hard to use. I think all my cards have been reissued flat by now.
I used those machines to charge cc’s at a major ski resort in California in 2004. At the end of the day I would enter all the details in an online terminal and process the charges for real.
this is what first came to mind for me too. I'm in my 40s and still saw them used semi-frequently during my life. In ~2015 I actually paid using one in a taxi, that was the last time.
Heh, in 2014 I remember taking a taxi that only accepted card using an imprinter, which was unfortunate because I had just gotten a new card and the numbers weren't embossed. He had to drive me to a gas station to get cash from an ATM.
I imagine there is a clear and distinct line between "I've never seen one of those" and "I can remember exactly how those sound". The sound of sliding that handle over the card is ... distinctive. I can discuss it with someone, slide my hand left and right, and say "shunk, shunk" and lots of people will very clearly remember them.
“Never heard of these”, meanwhile I was remembering a credit card that I used so often that I wore the coloring off the raised numbers.
And I guess if one has never seen these, I need to explain. In order to leave an impression on the carbon paper (I should probably explain that, too, huh?), a fair amount of pressure was needed (those old card imprinters didn’t require a gym membership, but a child could not operate one). That rolling pressure would eventually wear on the surface of the card, and turn the numbers white when the outer layer wore through.
If I remember correctly, this sound is part of Pink Floyd's song "Money"... part of the background rhythm. I wonder how many of the "Never heard of these" crowd would recognize it if they hard it in person... smile
Here,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_imprinter