Feeling slightly old..

[lovingboth]

I'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.. :)

Comments

[sfred]

We took credit card payments with a zhuzher like that, in the bookshop that was my first post-paper-round job.

[haggis]

My first grown up bank card was very keen to tell me it was 3! Cards! In! 1! because it was a cashpoint card, a cheque guarantee card as well as a debit card. I don't think I ever used the cheque guarantee bit of it. Or paid with a cheque in a shop either!

[rhialto]

I originally only know about credit cards and those machines from American movies. We paid with proper cash money, not that American nonsense...

[barakta]

Yep, I remember them.

I think in about 1997 was about when cashcards became pretty normal and the main way stuff worked but many cashpoints weren't compatible with others. I had an RBOS account cos that was the most prevalent bank in our area.

[thekumquat]

Yes, the small department store in my home town still used them when I was in 6th form and a bit after - so my card got chugged once or twice.

I used my cheque guarantee function of my debit card a few times as a student. That was after a difficult time at the start of my gap year, as I didn't turn 18 until a few months later, so couldn't have a debit or cheque guarantee card yet. Given I could only withdraw £50 cash a day, to pay my month's rent I had to go through the one supermarket in town five times in a row to buy a pack of gum and £50 cashback, because there wasn't a daily limit on that...