Feeling slightly old..
Sep. 22nd, 2023 01:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lovingbothI'm not the only one who remembers the old mechanical credit card machines retailers used, am I?
They'd put your card in it, a three part plasticy paper / carbon paper / paper form over it, and then move a slider over it so that the raised numbers on the card appeared on their top copy and your bottom receipt, thanks to the carbon paper.
There's one expensive purchase, a disk drive for an Atari 800 microcomputer that was around £400 in 1983, that I got for free when the branch of electrics retailer Laskeys I bought from had a robbery and all the day's top copies were stolen along with the rest of the contents of the till. No top copy, no way for them to get the money from the credit card companies.
Of course, the reason I said 'credit card' was that instead of debit cards, we had what I think of as 'cashpoint cards' (thanks to having an account with Lloyds from 1981 to 1991 where they messed something up while I was away at a by-election - other banks had different names for ATMs) most of which doubled up as cheque guarantee cards and you'd use those with your chequebook to pay for stuff in shops etc.
Cheques were.. :)
They'd put your card in it, a three part plasticy paper / carbon paper / paper form over it, and then move a slider over it so that the raised numbers on the card appeared on their top copy and your bottom receipt, thanks to the carbon paper.
There's one expensive purchase, a disk drive for an Atari 800 microcomputer that was around £400 in 1983, that I got for free when the branch of electrics retailer Laskeys I bought from had a robbery and all the day's top copies were stolen along with the rest of the contents of the till. No top copy, no way for them to get the money from the credit card companies.
Of course, the reason I said 'credit card' was that instead of debit cards, we had what I think of as 'cashpoint cards' (thanks to having an account with Lloyds from 1981 to 1991 where they messed something up while I was away at a by-election - other banks had different names for ATMs) most of which doubled up as cheque guarantee cards and you'd use those with your chequebook to pay for stuff in shops etc.
Cheques were.. :)