Web Site of The Week:
Web Site of The Week
Web Site of The Week for August 3 2009
by bits_blogger » Sun Aug 02, 2009 11:02 am
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Web Site of The Week for August 10 2009
by bits_blogger » Sun Aug 09, 2009 3:17 pm
Web Site of the Week: http://www.searchenginehistory.com/#early-engines
Below is a collage of some search engine logo's:
The grandfather of all search engines was Archie, created in 1990 by
Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal.
This week's "Bits & Bytes" column:
http://www.herald-journal.com/archives/2009/columns/mo081009.html--Bits_blogger--
Have a Great Week!
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Web Site of The Week for August 17 2009
by bits_blogger » Mon Aug 17, 2009 6:49 am
Web Site of The Week:
The reported user account which was at the center of the outage for Twitter.
When Twitter becomes overloaded or can no longer process "tweet traffic" this is the greeting one will see.
http://tinyurl.com/q2j6jrAbove link is from CISCO, and is entitled "Distributed Denial of Service Attacks."
Below information is taken from the above link's article:
The Internet consists of hundreds of millions of computers distributed all around the world. Millions of people use the Internet daily, taking full advantage of the available services at both personal and professional levels. The interconnectivity among computers on which the World Wide Web relies, however, renders its nodes an easy target for malicious users who attempt to exhaust their resources and launch Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks against them.
A DoS attack is a malicious attempt by a single person or a group of people to cause the victim, site, or node to deny service to its customers. When this attempt derives from a single host of the network, it constitutes a DoS attack. On the other hand, it is also possible that a lot of malicious hosts coordinate to flood the victim with an abundance of attack packets, so that the attack takes place simultaneously from multiple points. This type of attack is called a Distributed DoS, or DDoS attack.
DDoS Attack Description
DoS attacks attempt to exhaust the victim's resources. These resources can be network bandwidth, computing power, or operating system data structures. To launch a DDoS attack, malicious users first build a network of computers that they will use to produce the volume of traffic needed to deny services to computer users. To create this attack network, attackers discover vulnerable sites or hosts on the network. Vulnerable hosts are usually those that are either running no antivirus software or out-of-date antivirus software, or those that have not been properly patched. Vulnerable hosts are then exploited by attackers who use their vulnerability to gain access to these hosts. The next step for the intruder is to install new programs (known as attack tools) on the compromised hosts of the attack network. The hosts that are running these attack tools are known as zombies, and they can carry out any attack under the control of the attacker. Many zombies together form what we call an army.
But how can attackers discover the hosts that will make up the attack network, and how can they install the attack tools on these hosts? Though this preparation stage of the attack is very crucial, discovering vulnerable hosts and installing attack tools on them has become a very easy process. There is no need for the intruder to spend time in creating the attack tools because there are already prepared programs that automatically find vulnerable systems, break into these systems, and then install the necessary programs for the attack. After that, the systems that have been infected by the malicious code look for other vulnerable computers and install on them the same malicious code. Because of that widespread scanning to identify victim systems, it is possible that large attack networks can be built very quickly.
The result of this automated process is the creation of a DDoS attack network that consists of handler (master) and agent (slave, daemon) machines. It can be inferred from this process that another DDos attack takes place while the attack network is being built, because the process itself creates a significant amount of traffic.
In cases of DDoS attacks, spoofed source IP addresses are used in the packets of the attack traffic.
An attacker prefers to use such counterfeit source IP addresses for two major reasons: first, the
attackers want to hide the identity of the zombies so that the victim cannot trace the attack back to
them. The second reason concerns the performance of the attack. The attackers want to discourage
any attempt of the victim to filter out the malicious traffic.
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Web Site of The Week for August 24 2009
by bits_blogger » Sun Aug 23, 2009 12:26 pm
The Web Site of The Week features information about West Philly's "School of The Future."
At 8 a.m. on Sept. 7, 2006, a school bell rang for the first time at Philadelphia's School of the Future,
officially opening one of the nation's most advanced high schools.
The school, conceived by the School District of Philadelphia, Microsoft and the community of West
Philadelphia, delivers a new approach to curriculum, school design and the integration of technology
into the daily lives of teachers and students.
Instructional, environmental, architectural and technical elements focus on building a sustainable,
curriculum-driven environment to help students learn, and help teachers and administrators succeed.
Each student receives a tablet PC, wireless Internet access on campus and broadband access at home.
The school is packed with technology - it features a performance center with two hydraulically rotating
lecture halls to create small performing spaces for school and community performances; smart-card
accessible lockers; a water catchment system on the roof to collect rainwater for use in nonportable
applications; and photovoltaic panels in the building's glass windows and the roof.
The panels reduce heating and cooling costs by converting sunlight into direct current, contributing
electricity for the building and transmitting real-time data to students so they can assess the positive
impact on the environment.
In addition, a virtual teaching assistant, created by Microsoft specifically for the school, each student's
progress, allowing teachers to tailor deeper instruction for the advanced student or plans incorporate
extra review for students needing additional time to master a topic.
The School District of Philadelphia and Microsoft
Overview and background:
http://www.microsoft.com/education/schoolofthefuture/overview.aspx-
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Web Site of The Week for August 31 2009
by bits_blogger » Sun Aug 30, 2009 12:09 pm
40 years ago the first American ATM was readied and had been tested.
On Tuesday September 2, 1969 it became available to the public inside the Chemical Bank of New York
L to R: Dr. Spencer Crew, Director, National Museum of American
History; Mr. Don Wetzel, co-patentee of the Automatic Teller
Machine, and G. Henry Mundt III, President and Chief Executive
Officer, Mastercard Cirrus.
They are standing with an early NCR ATM at the presentation of
the artifact to the Smithsonian Institution. Cirrus coordinated the
donation of the object by Keycorp of Dayton, Ohio, and provided
funding for the video history and transcription documenting
Mr. Wetzel's involvement in the creation of the ATM.
Mr. Don Wetzel invented what most resembles
the ATM or Automatic Teller Machine which we
know today. I have also heard ATM referred to
as Any Time Money.
The following is a portion of an interview with Mr. Don Wetzel, Co-Patentee of the "ATM" or the Automatic Teller Machine
Conducted by Dr. David K. Allison, Curator, National Museum of American History on September 21, 1995.
Bits_Blogger note: The complete interview was too lengthy to put into this forum, so I have just posted the last 1/4 of the interview which focuses on the ATM development and first use of it at Chemical Bank in New York.
If you wish to read the complete interview, this is the link: http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/comphist/wetzel.htm#I
David: You got this idea in late '68, you did your marketing surveys, determined the potential here, and then you began developing a prototype in-house with your engineers?
Don: We did one thing before we started a prototype. There was one other issue that we thought had to be resolved: if we built this machine and the banks were interested in buying it, would the banks' customers use it? Because people, up until this time, had never interfaced directly with a piece of hardware, especially one that dealt with their money. So we took those students who were getting a Master's degree at the University of Dallas and asked the department there if they would make this a part of the program. They would make a national study to determine, or help us determine, whether people would use the machine, what kinds of people would use it, its demographics, age, females, etc. etc. They came back with a report that basically said most people would use it, some won't. It turned out that younger people were more likely to use it and the older people probably would not.
These were the years when consumer banking was really running rampant. Banks were converting from commercial banks to retail banks, so they wanted to offer something to younger people, especially the younger people because they were reaching that age beyond college, starting their first job, and banks wanted them as customers. They felt like "we have to offer some services that we haven't been offering." So this went hand in glove with the ATM -- it helped the bank serve its customers, it would attract those younger customers that they wanted; because once you've got a customer through one reason, then cross-selling got him into savings accounts and credit cards and a loan if he needed it -- all those things happen. So they were really trying to attract new business.
That study told us that there were enough people out there that would use the ATMs. And that's when we really got into the details of the plastic card. We were "going" now. We'd made a decision that this is what we ought to do. The only thing we had to do along the way was to convince the board of directors of Recognition Equipment, our parent company, that this was the product that Docutel ought to market.
So we prepared the usual things you do when you give a presentation. As I recall, there was only one gentleman on the board who objected strongly to this particular product. The rest said, "You know, it seems to make some sense. There's risk here but let's go ahead and try it." And it was ironic that the one gentleman who opposed it happened to be the banker on the board. We proceeded to build the prototype while we were looking for that manufacturer of the plastic card.
David: Do you recall about when the board made that decision?
Don: I'd say very late '68 or early '69.
David: What were you asking them for -- investment capital? Or was this software capital? Recognition Equipment capital? You were going for outside investors? Where would you --
Don: No. REI would go out to the community of bankers where they got their money and get the funding for this program. We were talking about $4 million to develop the ATM.
David: That was substantial.
Don: Yes it was. It was a risky thing they decided upon. We thought we backed it up with our studies. We did a lot of homework, we really did. But the mentality of people at that time was, remember, "we want to deal face-to-face with people. People are not going to walk up to a machine and use it. In fact we don't want them to do that, we want them coming to the bank and talking to us, because then we can sell them on some other things."
The truth of the matter is, that statement really wasn't true. The tellers never cross-sold to anybody. Their mentality was: "You have a check, I'm going to give you some money, and I hope you go away. And that way, if you move fast, I'll get to the next person and everybody will be happy."
David: So the data you got from your marketing study was that consumers want speed and convenience, not personal attention ....................,
Don: That's true. The customers did not agree with the bankers. The bankers always said, "Our customers, they know Susie, they've known her for a long time, and they feel very comfortable coming in and talking to her. And Susie likes to talk to them." Neither was true. Susie didn't know the customer. I didn't know my teller. I didn't go to the same teller, especially if this line over here was shorter. I went over there and I couldn't have cared less who the teller was.
So their thinking was not on target. And once we got past the hurdle of convincing our own people that people would use this machine because of the convenience factor, then we were able to move forward as fast as we could.
David: What other issue did you face then, looking towards development?
Don: Well, once we had approval to go ahead, then we really didn't have any major issues at that time except to go ahead and build this machine and make it work. In the machine there were, I would say, three major components besides the physical security of the unit. We had to develop a card reader that would read this card. We had to develop a dispensing unit that would dispense the dollar bills. And we had to develop a printer that would print the transaction, give a copy to the customer, and a copy retained in the machine to be processed in the back office as they did a check -- that's how the account was debited.
We had to develop those components. There were card-readers out there that we found, rather quickly, that if we had a card that was manufactured properly, it could be read very reliably. It was the mechanical things that gave us the most problems. If we had problems at all, they came from the dispensing unit and the printer. We had to get a dispensing unit that would dispense only one bill at a time -- we didn't want a double feed because people got more money than they were supposed to and we didn't want one that would jam the money. Those were the two areas that gave us the most trouble as we developed this dispensing unit.
We determined that we either had to have new or near-new money, fairly crisp money, to have it perform properly almost all the time. And we had to go through several iterations of that in order to get one that we felt comfortable with. And we did. In fact, that was Tom Barnes's task. He was the mechanical engineer who appears on the patent.
David: We were beginning to describe the way the development team that you put together worked and some of the people and what they did. And some of the technical problems that you had --
Don: Well, while we were working on the cash dispenser, to make it perform properly, the other task -- and the two were going on simultaneously -- was developing a printer, because we had to record the transaction. So we picked up the appropriate account number off the magnetic strip and then we had to record the amount that the customer had received, the routing and transit number of the bank, date, etc. Besides which we had the additional task -- and this is what made the printer a little difficult -- of printing that receipt in MICR so it could be read by the automated equipment in the back office. That made developing the printer a little more complicated. It wasn't just printing a roll of numbers representing account number, etc. of the bank. The MICR capability had to be embodied into the printer.
And we had to work on that and get it to work properly, because that was the key to recording the transaction for the bank. If anything went wrong with the printer, then the bank would not know who got that money. So that had to be extremely accurate, and that took a lot of work. I guess I'd have to say, if we had a problem that had to be solved in the early months of the first machines being installed, it came from the printer. The rest of the machine worked very well. We didn't have a problem reading cards, and we didn't have a problem dispensing money, but occasionally there was a problem where the receipt did not show the proper account number -- it missed a digit or you couldn't read a digit or something like that. Of course that was solved and the machines worked very well after that.
David: But you didn't consider going into any kind of an electronic solution because you couldn't work off the network? I mean, you must have seen that might be a solution for the future. Did you at that time?
Don: Oh we really did. Sure. We knew that eventually this particular terminal, the ATM and any others that were out there, and certainly they would be a teller terminal if you went into the bank, there would be a terminal eventually that would be on line to the computers. So we knew that was going to happen in time, but you have to sell what you have at a given point in time, and this was not available. I mean, it was not even considered by anybody at that point in time. Ours was an off-line machine, and we knew it was going to be that way for several years ahead. Once we went on line, then it became a piece of cake. Nobody overdrew their account because, as we know now, it checks your balance and if you do not have the money there you do not receive any cash.
We knew that we had to make these machines really work well, because the person had to receive the right amount of money, and the bank had to know who received it. And then you build all that into the fact that you had to have a plastic card with a magnetic stripe that worked. We had to come up with a method to encode the data on the stripe. See, at that point nobody had any machine available to do that. So we had to develop a little module.
We actually developed two products. We had a little module, with our little encryption codes in it, that we sent to the company that made the embossing machines, which also produced the plastic cards. Well, we had to have an extra station on those machines so that as the card went through and was embossed, it also encoded the magnetic stripe as well.
So we did that. And then we had a typewriter with the same little module in it that would actually encode the data on a card and then take it to a little manual embosser. If somebody came into the bank and said, "I lost my card" or "my card won't read well" or something of that nature, you could make one up right there in the bank lobby and give it to the customer. So there were two devices we had to come up with in order to solve those particular problems.
I guess those were the major concerns that we had to satisfy as far as the machine itself was concerned. We had a lot of discussions on the housing of the machine -- just how secure should this ATM be? We really didn't have a good handle on that. We talked to several consultants in the security business to get some help, and looking back now, I guess we went overboard.
We built a mechanical box that would have taken somebody eight hours with a blowtorch to cut through about a quarter of an inch. We had 5/8" stainless steel as the housing, which, looking back, we really didn't need but we thought very important at that point in time for the banker, who understood steel because he bought vault doors and safe deposit boxes and they were all this thick or thicker. So we felt it was very important that he feel very comfortable with with the security of the ATM. When he put his money in that machine and walked away and closed the door on Friday, he knew nobody was going to get into it and get his money.
So we did that, and everything fitted into the machine very nicely. We even went to the extent of putting heat sensors on the facia of the machines, because we knew we were going to be installing them in some cold areas. Of course, the first one was installed on Long Island but we installed them later in such places as New York and Minnesota. The heat sensors on the inside facia of the machine assured that when the temperature reached a certain degree, the metal heated up so that ice wouldn't harden on it and people could still use the machine.
A lot of little things went into the planning to make the machine functional, because this was sold as a seven-days-a-week, 24-hours-a-day machine, so it had to be usable; and when it wasn't, people became very irritated, because very quickly, early on, once a person used it once or twice, they really depended on that machine being there to get the money when they needed it. If it didn't work they got very mad!
David: When you loaded up the work team that you had at Docutel, how many people were on it? Was it all engineers or did you have marketing from the outside? What was the team that sort of took this idea for the decision to spend 48 hours and to apply what you began --
Don: Well, bear in mind, now: we were a very small company and a very small division within a very small company. So the president of course was very involved. We had an executive vice president who was very involved. There was myself -- this was when we were developing the ATM, before we were actually really starting marketing because once we started that we brought some more people on board. We had a vice president of manufacturing, and then we had two engineers who were assigned to this particular project: Tom Barnes, mechanical engineer, and George Chastain, the electrical engineer.
Then they had several support people, I couldn't tell you how many there were. They were the ones who, let's say, once an idea was developed, "let's try this type of arm on this dispenser." So I guess overall, David, we were thinking in terms of maybe 15 to 20 people on this.
David: What was the timetable for putting this first machine out?
Don: Well, I guess we really started developing the machine itself in probably January or February of '69. That was the prototype. We actually started out with a hardwired machine and we were having fits with it. We just couldn't get it to work. There were so many wires that if you just turned it a little bit, somewhere one came loose and then you spent the next day trying to find it. In fact, George Chastain, the engineer in charge, made the comment one day after being frustrated for many hours that "this darn thing wouldn't even make a good boat anchor." Well, mini-computers came out around that time, so we just discarded the wires completely and went to the mini-computer inside, and that saved our neck. Then we moved rapidly thereafter.
Another interesting story: while we were building the prototype I was making a few trips to call on the bankers to sell the concept and try and sell the machine. We knew "we've got to get one in, somewhere," and it was my philosophy that we did not want to give this machine away. We could have gotten the machine installed in a number of places if we just gave it to the bank. My objection to that was that just getting it in the wall of the bank was not a big problem. We had to get people to use it in order to convince the rest of the world that they liked it and that the banks ought to get more of them. And in order to do that, you had to promote it, and the bank had to spend some money doing that.
If they had no investment in this machine, I felt like they were not going to promote it properly. If they had an investment in the machine, then they would. I felt very strongly that the bank had to have an investment in this in order to promote it. The chairman of the board of REI felt very strongly that we should give the machine to one of the creditor banks that was lending company money. But I won out in the end, and actually we sold the machine for more money than we came out with it to the marketplace later on. The machine was installed at a Long Island branch of Chemical Bank in September of '69, and it worked well. We didn't have any major problems. A few minor ones, but that was OK.
Getting back to the story about the engineering: I had gone over to Atlanta to make a sales call on this bank, a very progressive bank; I thought they might be interested in this concept. They were. They thought it really sounded good. So I came back home, and the next day I had a phone call from the executive vice president of the bank who said, "We're getting on our bank airplane Monday morning, five of us, we want to come over and see this machine."
I thought, "Great!" So I told the engineers that you know this thing's got to be working on Monday morning. (he laughs) It's very important." When I got to the office early Monday morning, it was not working. This was a hardwired machine, by the way. This is the kind of thing we went through almost on a daily basis for a while. I told George Chastain that I would have them come into the conference room and I'd give them a little history of Docutel, a little history about the idea, the concept, automatic tellers, and so on. And then we'd go and get a demonstration. I left the door ajar a little bit and I said, "George, periodically you walk up and down that aisle and if the machine is down, do this [he points his thumb down], if it's up, then I'll know to break it off and we'll go in."
Well, I started out, I went through the course of our history and George came by about twice and gave me the old "down" signal. So I went around again; same thing again. Did this for about an hour and a half. Finally this executive vice president says, "I know more about Docutel now than you do. This machine isn't working, right?" I said, "That's right, it's not working." He said, "That's OK, let us look at it anyhow." I said, "OK."
So we went out into the lab and we showed them the machine. And they understood what we were doing and they could visually see that we were serious. We were going to build this machine. The only problem was, it wasn't working. And you know -- "the money came out here, you put the card in here, here's the dispenser" and all of that -- we showed them the guts of the machine. It never did work that day. They went back to Atlanta. In two days I received a phone call and they ordered five. Now, this was a very progressive bank. It's still around today and it's still a very progressive bank.
But those are the kinds of things we went through. Kind of nerve-wracking at times. You never knew what the end result was going to be. But we did get away from that hardwired machine. And we went to a mini-computer, what we know as computers today. That really solved our electronic problems.
David: Before we get into the installation on Long Island, let me just ask you about the patent.
Don: Well, the company filed in 1970 for the patent on the ATM and the patent, as I recall, was for a machine that dispensed money at the request of a person who had a plastic card with a properly encoded magnetic stripe or something like that. We reapplied. Apparently it wasn't worded properly or something was not clear. We had a lawyer at the company, by the way, and he reapplied in 1971. We found out, I guess it was about this time, that there was a company in California, I believe, who had produced on a very small scale a plastic card with a magnetic stripe. Docutel worked out something where their objection was satisfied, so the patent to Docutel was issued in 1973. But it was not a totally exclusive-type patent that you can get on some products. That's my understanding of it.
David: The way you told the story, you made the internal design, using existing technology for the pieces. Did you follow other people involved in doing something pretty similar that you drew on? Or did you mostly follow your own model?
Don: Well, you know the product that we developed was exactly that: we developed it. I don't know what the company did with the stripe out in California but it was a very minuscule type of thing. I feel like we developed the magnetic stripe on a plastic card. We didn't personally develop it, we pushed it on a plastic card manufacturer to develop it. So I would think that we were responsible for those stripes on plastic cards that we all see today. There were machines that gave out coins. You put a dollar in and it gave out coins. Ours was a little different but it was a dispensing mechanism, so there was nothing unique to that. A lot of printers were out there. Some very sophisticated ones, some not so sophisticated. We had to modify whatever was there to fit our needs. So I can't say that we went from nowhere to what we had, and we developed it all.
David: But you had a unique way of putting the pieces together.
Don: Right.
David: Now, you talked some about the development -- as you began to look for customers for this technology, what was that process like? We talked earlier on just the marketing or the original development stage some of the resistance or concerns. How had you found that you had pieces and people began to come look at -- what was the general reaction to innovation that you guys were putting together?
Don: Well, it was mixed. We went out initially and talked to bankers that we knew. We had, like, this banker was on the board, and we had some other executives on the board from other companies and they knew bankers. The president of our company was an ex-IBMer. The executive vice president of REI was an ex-IBMer. So we used various contacts to go to those people first, and for the most part these were either senior operating people or they were executives, most of them, in the larger banks. These were our initial contacts. And that's how we got to meet the proper people at Chemical Bank.
Early on, I was the person who did that. We didn't have a marketing force at that point in time. We didn't have any salesmen, so I was the one that went out and perhaps you know the story. I had this cardboard mockup of the machine and I carried that on my lap on airplanes and went to New York and Atlanta and Minneapolis and San Francisco and all those kind of places, to actually show them what this machine was going to look like. We had little places on it where, you know, "here's the card reader and here's the keys where you key in your PIN number," et cetera.
So they could visualize just exactly what they would get if they ordered this machine. The reaction, as I said, was mixed. There were some who thought it was a crazy idea and some of the progressive-minded bankers who were really wanting to get into the retail business. They thought it might have merit. And those were the ones to whom we were saying, "Come on down to Dallas and we'll show this thing, we're not kidding, we're serious about it, we are building it, and we'd like to sell you some." That was the effort at that point in time.
David: Was the resistance along lines that earlier people were thinking of a personal service as opposed to a mechanized service? Or were there other types of reasons?
Don: There were basically two reasons. That was one, the other one was cost. You know, they were thinking in terms of -- a lot of them related this to a typewriter. "A typewriter only costs $600. You guys are talking $18,000? When I've got a row of tellers in here now doing the same thing? You know, I don't see why we ought to spend that kind of money." And of course that was just for the machine, you had to pay for maintenance and you had to install it, and it was very important -- and we stressed this very much -- that you really had to promote it. Just sticking it in the wall wouldn't cut it. We had designed posters that they could buy and use, we had a video that we would show to the tellers to train them as to what to tell the customers. We had mockups of the machine that we put in the lobby so that one of the customer personnel at the bank, as their customer came through the teller line, they would ask the person to come over to this new device. This was after they had bought some but hadn't installed them yet. They'd take them over there to the model and show them how it would work.
So there were some expenses involved in the promotion of this, and we had to make sure that they understood that. The thing that helped us the most eventually, I guess, was we came up with a sales tool that showed the institution basically that if they obtained x-number of new demand deposit customers and x-number of savings account customers, that would offset the cost of the machine, and not only offset the cost but make them money. And we would ask them, each individual bank, how much they netted off of a DDA account or savings account annually, and they gave us their numbers. Once they gave us those numbers, then it was a simple mathematical thing we had to go through that said if you get x-number of new accounts, here's how much money you're going to earn.
At that time they were really out to get those customers, and offering a service that the bank down the street didn't have helped us tremendously in the beginning. "Be the first! Get those machines in, you have something the other banks don't have, and all you need is x-number and you have a real winner." And that's why the majority of the early users bought. Then it was follow the leader. "If he's got it, then we better get it." So the next bank ordered it. That's the way the sales cycle went. And then at some point in time there was no analysis made. "We've got to have 'em, it doesn't mattter what the cost is, we have to have 'em because we're not going to keep our customers and we're not going to get any new ones."
David: Why Chemical Bank?
Don: Well, Chemical Bank was one of the banks that loaned money to REI, so the chairman of REI knew some key people there and he got me in the front door. That's how it all started. The people I talked with kind of liked the idea and they said, "Let's do it."
David: You installed it first in a lobby, was it also 24 hours or was it just --
Don: No, it wasn't in a lobby, it was actually in the wall of the bank, out on the street. They put a canopy over it to protect it from the rain and the weather of all sorts. Unfortunately they put the canopy too high and the rain came under it. (laughing) One time we had water in the machine and we had to do some extensive repairs. It was a walkup on the outside of the bank. That was the first one. And it was a cash dispenser only, not a full ATM.
David: I'm sure your engineers took on the line for a couple of months?
Don: Oh absolutely. We had them up there just standing by even when (he laughs) it was working. And we had to provide local service, so that's when we started to hire our own maintenance team. We started to hire salesmen about that time or slightly before. So now we're getting into the marketing/servicing/promotion. I remember the big ad that Chemical put in the Long Island News or whatever that paper is out there. "Our branch at such-and-such a location will open on September" -- I'm not sure of the date but I thought it was September 3 -- "will open its doors at 9 a.m. and never close again." That was a big full-page deal. And that's how they kicked off the program.
That gets back to the point I made earlier. You had to promote it in order to get people to use it. And a lot of people had to come in and ask for a card, I mean, they just didn't give cards to everybody, because at this point in time, you see, these were credit cards, we put stripes on a credit card. There were no ATM card or a debit card. So they picked the people that they wanted to use it. Remember, we're still off-line, so they wanted to give them to good customers, people that they felt comfortable with who wouldn't abuse the privilege.
David: What was the reaction to the machine in that community?
Don: Well, I'd have to say it was favorable because shortly thereafter the bank ordered some more. I think the bank was pleased and I think the customers were happy.
David: You don't remember any particular glitches ..... the canopy? Was that the worst problem you had --
Don: The worst problem we had, there was a driving rainstorm and water came through a crack in the facia. We had a facia that was sort of angled and then a little shelf down below that went around, and for some reason water got through there -- it wasn't supposed to -- and it got down into the pan where the mini was and that destroyed the mini. We eventually had to replace it, but we were down for probably a couple of days. And that was not a good time to be down for two days, especially when you're talking about the bank opens at nine and (laughing) never closes again! But we fixed it, and the bank understood. This was the first machine. They knew that there were going to be some problems and we didn't know exactly what they were going to be, but for the most part the machine worked well and the customers started to use it. And as they saw it building up, I think that gave the bank confidence enough to expand the program.
And then the selling job becomes a lot easier when you have one installed and a banker can talk to another banker, not to the salesman who's saying all these neat things. He gets what he considers the really true story. And then that makes the next sale easier. From then on it started to move pretty good.
David: Did you stay within your $4 million or whatever the original stake was, or was it more expensive than you expected?
Don: I think we were very close to it. We may have exceeded it a little bit, maybe by about $5 million, something like that, but we were pretty much on target. We were watched very closely by REI. You know, at that time REI was a very sophisticated image-processing company, one of the leaders in the world as a matter of fact. So they had a pretty good idea what hardware should do and could do. They watched the dollars. So we had them looking over our shoulders on a regular basis. It was very important that we build this machine, deliver it on time, and make it work.
David: It looks like you were under a lot of pressure.
Don: (laughing) Well, you might say this was not the color of my hair then.
David: Do you remember it being real stressful or is it more exciting -- how do you remember that period?
Don: No, I remember it as exciting. I used to get frustrated because things didn't happen as fast as I wanted them to. As I recall we delayed delivery of the machine, like, 30 days, and that was upsetting, because obviously it was delayed because it wasn't working properly. That kind of thing for any marketing person is very disturbing. But for the most part it was more exciting than it was frustrating, because you could see the interest building. Even before the installation of the first machine, as I made my sales calls, just seeing these bankers say, "You know, that sounds pretty good, but I'd like to see one installed first." Or "Yeah, I'd like to come down to Dallas." We had a lot of people coming down to the plant to see this prototype.[/1]
[i]And then once we got a few orders and started a production line, then it really became exciting. Because then we could take them over to the plant and we could say, "Now, if you ordered, this would be the machine that you would get, but you're not going to get this one over here, this is going to Chase Manhattan."
David: So you began to pick up orders pretty raidly out there, the original --
Don: Right. It really moved good. We had some who wanted to wait for what at that time we called "the total teller." We had a cash dispenser, and then the next version was going to be the total teller, which is the ATM we all know today -- takes deposits, transfers money from checking to savings, savings to checking, cash advances to your credit card, takes payments; things like that. So they didn't want just a cash dispenser alone.
David: And the so-called total teller, did you have an off-line version of that? Or did they have to be on-line?
Don: No, as a matter of fact it was off-line at first. Didn't have to be on-line, it was the same principle. The key to the security of the off-line, in my opinion, was this encryption that we did on the magnetic stripe. Every time the card was used, we manipulated the bits on the stripe, so they never went back in the same place they were before. And we had some coded bits that if they were in a certain location, that meant that Formula A was used in order to read it properly. If they were in another location after it was used, then Formula B was used. So that we made it very difficult for anyone to decode the data. I don't know of anybody who actually broke the code from copying cards and could just keep on using them and get money out. That was really a key to the success.
David: The whole security ....
Don: Right. Because we were off-line at the time. And the PIN was actually on the stripe, and the thought was, well, if somebody can decode the data on the stripe, then you had all the data you'd need and you could go make cards and just run them and run them and run them. Now, of course, the PIN is not on the stripe since we're on-line.
David: So I can envision how this began to unfold. What were your problems as you began to be began to be more successful?
Don: Well, our biggest problem was our success. The time that we had a financial crisis on our hands was when we had the largest back order we ever had. We just didn't have the cash to pay the bills because we had all these orders and we'd gone into production and bought all this equipment and supplies to build and meet the delivery schedules. And the cash wasn't there because you know what happens -- you do not get the money as soon as you get the orders; you get the money even after it's installed for a period of time. So I'd say that probably was our most severe problem at one point in time.
We had a marvelous vice president of manufacturing, he was very good -- he came from TI, as I said, and had a lot of experience. So we could get the machines out at a pretty rapid clip. The problem was more financial than it was anything else. Then we started to bring on people. We had regional offices in a number of sections of the country, with managers and salesmen and service personnel. So it really took off very well.
David: And you stayed with that for a while as you went forth from that early development?
Don: I had a personal setback in 1970. My wife died of cancer. I remarried in 1972. My wife then, who was also a widow, had eight children. When we got married we wound up with 12 children. And I was doing an awful lot of traveling. I traveled almost every week somewhere, and it seemed like every time I hit the road and called home, something had happened -- you know, so-and-so broke his finger, or the principal wants to meet with you next Monday; something like that. She was trying to run this household with 12 kids running around and they were all at home.
So I decided, in '73, that this was rather unfair and I really needed to stay home. So it was in '73 that I resigned from Docutel, and started my first company, called Financial Systems & Equipment.
David: An unusual decision for a man to make at that time.
Don: Well, it really was. Because we were at our heyday then, in '73. It was great. And I really enjoyed it, I really did. I didn't mind traveling, I really enjoyed selling, and it was exciting, a whole new idea, you know. I even traveled overseas, so I was having an awful lot of fun as well. But I realized that I just couldn't keep on doing that. So that's when I started the other company.
David: And you were able to resume your commitment to your family, then, with that decision.
Don: Right.
David: That's very admirable. And how did the next company work out?
Don: Well, it started out slow. I made a decision at that time -- I was getting a little bit burned out with computers. What with IBM all those years, and then Docutel and going through those phases there, I decided that I was going to try something different. I would not sell anything that was computerized. And my background being around banks, I decided I would sell bank equipment but not computerized banking equipment.
I became a manufacturer's representative and I sold products like vault doors, safe deposit boxes, drive-up motor banks, and under-counter equipment, plain old vanilla stuff. You didn't have to be a mental giant, really, you just had to make a lot of sales calls and get in there and convince people your products were good. And that went well, it was a little slow at the beginning but later on it went well and the company was around for probably 18 years. While that was going on, I started a second company -- and this was about five years later, in 1978 -- called Electronic Banking Systems, with a former Docutel salesman. We did a lot of consulting work with companies and banks that were in the ATM business, so we got back into it again.
I believe we were the first company that put ATMs in supermarkets. We had devised a formula that we would buy the machines from the manufacturers, we would place them in supermarkets, and we would charge so much a transaction and the supermarkets would get so much. That's how we started working with the switching companies like Cirrus. That went very well, in fact so well that in 1984 we were bought by Docutel. (he laughs) So it all came back around in circles.
Docutel bought our company Electronic Banking systems and my partner and I went to work for Docutel. I had hired a president for Financial Systems and Equipment and we had all the people -- the sales and service and administrative personnel. Two companies were going on until we sold Electronic Banking Systems to Docutel and part of the deal was we had to go to work for Docutel, for a short period of time at least.
Before we sold Electronic Banking Systems, in 1979 I started a third company called Autosig Systems, Inc. That is a company, it still exists, that markets an electronic signature verification system that we sell to the financial community. I'm chairman of the board of that right now and it's still in existence. In 1989 I retired.
David: I have to say, it's an unusual person who'd quit the job, and then to have more time with his family, start three companies.
Don: (laughing) Well, I was home most of the time -- at least I was in Dallas most of the time.
David: You apparently were able to do this while keeping time for your family, or --
Don: Oh yeah, I did a little bit of travel, I wasn't home all the time and that probably helped our marriage somewhat. But I was home an awful lot more than I was when I traveled with Docutel, because with them I was gone, usually on a Monday morning and back on Friday. With the other companies I didn't do a whole lot of travel -- you know, when a salesman had a situation on his hands and you could parade in somebody who supposedly knows a lot, that's the kind of trip I would make. So it worked out very well, for me and my family, I think.
David: And did you enjoy the freedom of starting your own companies?
Don: It was exciting, it really was exciting. Of course I'd never done anything like that. I'd always worked for substantial companies, knew when the paycheck was going to come, it was going to be so much, would come on a certain day, -- great. But you know when you're working for yourself, you just don't know those things. So there was a certain amount of uncertainty involved in this. There were times when I was kind of nervous because I had a lot of responsibilities at home. But it all worked out well and the money has been good for me over the years.
David: And I would assume your earlier successes had given you some financial --
Don: Had a little bit of cushion -- and being a manufacturer's rep with the first company, I was able to work out some deals with them where they paid me up front for a period of time which let me get established. That worked out well and was very essential as it turned out to be. Because I tell everybody now, you work up your plan, your budget, and whatever you come up with, you triple your expenses and you halve your revenue and that's probably what's going to happen the first year.
David: Now, Don, you've seen American industry and the computer industry from a lot of different perspectives. You've been very successful. One of the things we're really interested in, and the Smithsonian is studying, is how innovation works in the government -- in particular, how young people are innovative in their perspectives and seeing what it's been like for other people.
If you were to talk to young people who want to go off and try something new, do something new, what would be your advice to them?
Don: I think, first of all, the pleasure you get out of trying something that is innovative and something that you thought of, is very exciting, and it can be very rewarding. Most of the time it is. Sometimes it's not but most of the time it is.
I also think that the climate, especially today, is very receptive to innovative thinking. The way we do business in the United States, the way corporations and people are receptive to new ideas now -- I think that's totally different from the way it used to be. The chances of success are much greater now than they used to be. You know, good ideas are always received well but nowadays I think, in our world, a person who would like to try something new ought to very definitely try it and get out there and do it. It takes hard work and it takes a lot of persistence but it really pays off most of the time.
David: Any secrets in terms of how to work -- it seems like you learned a lot about the use of your ideas before you went in for development --
Don: I think it's very important to do your homework. I've talked to a number of people who had ideas but they really hadn't done any homework. Yes, it's great to have a great idea but you have to know what the potential for that idea is. You also have to know how much money it is going to take to develop that idea. And if you don't do those things, you may come up with the best product in the world and nobody will ever buy it. So it's a waste of time and very discouraging.
David: Anything else that you think of we should report for the record here about this innovation and your role in it?
Don: I really think the future holds many great possibilities. I think the ATM was the first instance where a person had the opportunity to interface with a piece of machinery, and that allowed that person then to be comfortable with interfacing to other pieces that came out since then -- like PCs, as an example, and we all know the success of the PC. I think we're going to see much, much more of that happening in the future.
I think people nowadays and in the future are going to have the opportunity to not only come up with a lot of new products but also to be able to use those products in ways they never dreamed of. The future, without a doubt, is going to be more exciting than the past.
David: Do you have any concern about interfacing with equipment rather than people?
Don: I don't in the broad sense. Not at all. The only reservation I have is that when you have access to things that might be morally decaying, and I guess I'm referring directly to Internet right now. I believe that would be bad. I think in certain areas to some extent proper controls need to be there to make sure bad things don't happen as a result of interfacing with equipment.
David: Don, we want to thank you for your time and your willingness to talk to us. I think you've given a terrific record.
Don: It's been my pleasure, David, to be here and to be part of the Smithsonian and having the ATM here.
END OF INTERVIEW
This week's Bits & Bytes column: http://www.herald-journal.com/archives/2009/columns/mo083109.html
The Bits_blogger
Have a Great Week!
On Tuesday September 2, 1969 it became available to the public inside the Chemical Bank of New York
L to R: Dr. Spencer Crew, Director, National Museum of American
History; Mr. Don Wetzel, co-patentee of the Automatic Teller
Machine, and G. Henry Mundt III, President and Chief Executive
Officer, Mastercard Cirrus.
They are standing with an early NCR ATM at the presentation of
the artifact to the Smithsonian Institution. Cirrus coordinated the
donation of the object by Keycorp of Dayton, Ohio, and provided
funding for the video history and transcription documenting
Mr. Wetzel's involvement in the creation of the ATM.
Mr. Don Wetzel invented what most resembles
the ATM or Automatic Teller Machine which we
know today. I have also heard ATM referred to
as Any Time Money.
The following is a portion of an interview with Mr. Don Wetzel, Co-Patentee of the "ATM" or the Automatic Teller Machine
Conducted by Dr. David K. Allison, Curator, National Museum of American History on September 21, 1995.
Bits_Blogger note: The complete interview was too lengthy to put into this forum, so I have just posted the last 1/4 of the interview which focuses on the ATM development and first use of it at Chemical Bank in New York.
If you wish to read the complete interview, this is the link: http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/comphist/wetzel.htm#I
David: You got this idea in late '68, you did your marketing surveys, determined the potential here, and then you began developing a prototype in-house with your engineers?
Don: We did one thing before we started a prototype. There was one other issue that we thought had to be resolved: if we built this machine and the banks were interested in buying it, would the banks' customers use it? Because people, up until this time, had never interfaced directly with a piece of hardware, especially one that dealt with their money. So we took those students who were getting a Master's degree at the University of Dallas and asked the department there if they would make this a part of the program. They would make a national study to determine, or help us determine, whether people would use the machine, what kinds of people would use it, its demographics, age, females, etc. etc. They came back with a report that basically said most people would use it, some won't. It turned out that younger people were more likely to use it and the older people probably would not.
These were the years when consumer banking was really running rampant. Banks were converting from commercial banks to retail banks, so they wanted to offer something to younger people, especially the younger people because they were reaching that age beyond college, starting their first job, and banks wanted them as customers. They felt like "we have to offer some services that we haven't been offering." So this went hand in glove with the ATM -- it helped the bank serve its customers, it would attract those younger customers that they wanted; because once you've got a customer through one reason, then cross-selling got him into savings accounts and credit cards and a loan if he needed it -- all those things happen. So they were really trying to attract new business.
That study told us that there were enough people out there that would use the ATMs. And that's when we really got into the details of the plastic card. We were "going" now. We'd made a decision that this is what we ought to do. The only thing we had to do along the way was to convince the board of directors of Recognition Equipment, our parent company, that this was the product that Docutel ought to market.
So we prepared the usual things you do when you give a presentation. As I recall, there was only one gentleman on the board who objected strongly to this particular product. The rest said, "You know, it seems to make some sense. There's risk here but let's go ahead and try it." And it was ironic that the one gentleman who opposed it happened to be the banker on the board. We proceeded to build the prototype while we were looking for that manufacturer of the plastic card.
David: Do you recall about when the board made that decision?
Don: I'd say very late '68 or early '69.
David: What were you asking them for -- investment capital? Or was this software capital? Recognition Equipment capital? You were going for outside investors? Where would you --
Don: No. REI would go out to the community of bankers where they got their money and get the funding for this program. We were talking about $4 million to develop the ATM.
David: That was substantial.
Don: Yes it was. It was a risky thing they decided upon. We thought we backed it up with our studies. We did a lot of homework, we really did. But the mentality of people at that time was, remember, "we want to deal face-to-face with people. People are not going to walk up to a machine and use it. In fact we don't want them to do that, we want them coming to the bank and talking to us, because then we can sell them on some other things."
The truth of the matter is, that statement really wasn't true. The tellers never cross-sold to anybody. Their mentality was: "You have a check, I'm going to give you some money, and I hope you go away. And that way, if you move fast, I'll get to the next person and everybody will be happy."
David: So the data you got from your marketing study was that consumers want speed and convenience, not personal attention ....................,
Don: That's true. The customers did not agree with the bankers. The bankers always said, "Our customers, they know Susie, they've known her for a long time, and they feel very comfortable coming in and talking to her. And Susie likes to talk to them." Neither was true. Susie didn't know the customer. I didn't know my teller. I didn't go to the same teller, especially if this line over here was shorter. I went over there and I couldn't have cared less who the teller was.
So their thinking was not on target. And once we got past the hurdle of convincing our own people that people would use this machine because of the convenience factor, then we were able to move forward as fast as we could.
David: What other issue did you face then, looking towards development?
Don: Well, once we had approval to go ahead, then we really didn't have any major issues at that time except to go ahead and build this machine and make it work. In the machine there were, I would say, three major components besides the physical security of the unit. We had to develop a card reader that would read this card. We had to develop a dispensing unit that would dispense the dollar bills. And we had to develop a printer that would print the transaction, give a copy to the customer, and a copy retained in the machine to be processed in the back office as they did a check -- that's how the account was debited.
We had to develop those components. There were card-readers out there that we found, rather quickly, that if we had a card that was manufactured properly, it could be read very reliably. It was the mechanical things that gave us the most problems. If we had problems at all, they came from the dispensing unit and the printer. We had to get a dispensing unit that would dispense only one bill at a time -- we didn't want a double feed because people got more money than they were supposed to and we didn't want one that would jam the money. Those were the two areas that gave us the most trouble as we developed this dispensing unit.
We determined that we either had to have new or near-new money, fairly crisp money, to have it perform properly almost all the time. And we had to go through several iterations of that in order to get one that we felt comfortable with. And we did. In fact, that was Tom Barnes's task. He was the mechanical engineer who appears on the patent.
David: We were beginning to describe the way the development team that you put together worked and some of the people and what they did. And some of the technical problems that you had --
Don: Well, while we were working on the cash dispenser, to make it perform properly, the other task -- and the two were going on simultaneously -- was developing a printer, because we had to record the transaction. So we picked up the appropriate account number off the magnetic strip and then we had to record the amount that the customer had received, the routing and transit number of the bank, date, etc. Besides which we had the additional task -- and this is what made the printer a little difficult -- of printing that receipt in MICR so it could be read by the automated equipment in the back office. That made developing the printer a little more complicated. It wasn't just printing a roll of numbers representing account number, etc. of the bank. The MICR capability had to be embodied into the printer.
And we had to work on that and get it to work properly, because that was the key to recording the transaction for the bank. If anything went wrong with the printer, then the bank would not know who got that money. So that had to be extremely accurate, and that took a lot of work. I guess I'd have to say, if we had a problem that had to be solved in the early months of the first machines being installed, it came from the printer. The rest of the machine worked very well. We didn't have a problem reading cards, and we didn't have a problem dispensing money, but occasionally there was a problem where the receipt did not show the proper account number -- it missed a digit or you couldn't read a digit or something like that. Of course that was solved and the machines worked very well after that.
David: But you didn't consider going into any kind of an electronic solution because you couldn't work off the network? I mean, you must have seen that might be a solution for the future. Did you at that time?
Don: Oh we really did. Sure. We knew that eventually this particular terminal, the ATM and any others that were out there, and certainly they would be a teller terminal if you went into the bank, there would be a terminal eventually that would be on line to the computers. So we knew that was going to happen in time, but you have to sell what you have at a given point in time, and this was not available. I mean, it was not even considered by anybody at that point in time. Ours was an off-line machine, and we knew it was going to be that way for several years ahead. Once we went on line, then it became a piece of cake. Nobody overdrew their account because, as we know now, it checks your balance and if you do not have the money there you do not receive any cash.
We knew that we had to make these machines really work well, because the person had to receive the right amount of money, and the bank had to know who received it. And then you build all that into the fact that you had to have a plastic card with a magnetic stripe that worked. We had to come up with a method to encode the data on the stripe. See, at that point nobody had any machine available to do that. So we had to develop a little module.
We actually developed two products. We had a little module, with our little encryption codes in it, that we sent to the company that made the embossing machines, which also produced the plastic cards. Well, we had to have an extra station on those machines so that as the card went through and was embossed, it also encoded the magnetic stripe as well.
So we did that. And then we had a typewriter with the same little module in it that would actually encode the data on a card and then take it to a little manual embosser. If somebody came into the bank and said, "I lost my card" or "my card won't read well" or something of that nature, you could make one up right there in the bank lobby and give it to the customer. So there were two devices we had to come up with in order to solve those particular problems.
I guess those were the major concerns that we had to satisfy as far as the machine itself was concerned. We had a lot of discussions on the housing of the machine -- just how secure should this ATM be? We really didn't have a good handle on that. We talked to several consultants in the security business to get some help, and looking back now, I guess we went overboard.
We built a mechanical box that would have taken somebody eight hours with a blowtorch to cut through about a quarter of an inch. We had 5/8" stainless steel as the housing, which, looking back, we really didn't need but we thought very important at that point in time for the banker, who understood steel because he bought vault doors and safe deposit boxes and they were all this thick or thicker. So we felt it was very important that he feel very comfortable with with the security of the ATM. When he put his money in that machine and walked away and closed the door on Friday, he knew nobody was going to get into it and get his money.
So we did that, and everything fitted into the machine very nicely. We even went to the extent of putting heat sensors on the facia of the machines, because we knew we were going to be installing them in some cold areas. Of course, the first one was installed on Long Island but we installed them later in such places as New York and Minnesota. The heat sensors on the inside facia of the machine assured that when the temperature reached a certain degree, the metal heated up so that ice wouldn't harden on it and people could still use the machine.
A lot of little things went into the planning to make the machine functional, because this was sold as a seven-days-a-week, 24-hours-a-day machine, so it had to be usable; and when it wasn't, people became very irritated, because very quickly, early on, once a person used it once or twice, they really depended on that machine being there to get the money when they needed it. If it didn't work they got very mad!
David: When you loaded up the work team that you had at Docutel, how many people were on it? Was it all engineers or did you have marketing from the outside? What was the team that sort of took this idea for the decision to spend 48 hours and to apply what you began --
Don: Well, bear in mind, now: we were a very small company and a very small division within a very small company. So the president of course was very involved. We had an executive vice president who was very involved. There was myself -- this was when we were developing the ATM, before we were actually really starting marketing because once we started that we brought some more people on board. We had a vice president of manufacturing, and then we had two engineers who were assigned to this particular project: Tom Barnes, mechanical engineer, and George Chastain, the electrical engineer.
Then they had several support people, I couldn't tell you how many there were. They were the ones who, let's say, once an idea was developed, "let's try this type of arm on this dispenser." So I guess overall, David, we were thinking in terms of maybe 15 to 20 people on this.
David: What was the timetable for putting this first machine out?
Don: Well, I guess we really started developing the machine itself in probably January or February of '69. That was the prototype. We actually started out with a hardwired machine and we were having fits with it. We just couldn't get it to work. There were so many wires that if you just turned it a little bit, somewhere one came loose and then you spent the next day trying to find it. In fact, George Chastain, the engineer in charge, made the comment one day after being frustrated for many hours that "this darn thing wouldn't even make a good boat anchor." Well, mini-computers came out around that time, so we just discarded the wires completely and went to the mini-computer inside, and that saved our neck. Then we moved rapidly thereafter.
Another interesting story: while we were building the prototype I was making a few trips to call on the bankers to sell the concept and try and sell the machine. We knew "we've got to get one in, somewhere," and it was my philosophy that we did not want to give this machine away. We could have gotten the machine installed in a number of places if we just gave it to the bank. My objection to that was that just getting it in the wall of the bank was not a big problem. We had to get people to use it in order to convince the rest of the world that they liked it and that the banks ought to get more of them. And in order to do that, you had to promote it, and the bank had to spend some money doing that.
If they had no investment in this machine, I felt like they were not going to promote it properly. If they had an investment in the machine, then they would. I felt very strongly that the bank had to have an investment in this in order to promote it. The chairman of the board of REI felt very strongly that we should give the machine to one of the creditor banks that was lending company money. But I won out in the end, and actually we sold the machine for more money than we came out with it to the marketplace later on. The machine was installed at a Long Island branch of Chemical Bank in September of '69, and it worked well. We didn't have any major problems. A few minor ones, but that was OK.
Getting back to the story about the engineering: I had gone over to Atlanta to make a sales call on this bank, a very progressive bank; I thought they might be interested in this concept. They were. They thought it really sounded good. So I came back home, and the next day I had a phone call from the executive vice president of the bank who said, "We're getting on our bank airplane Monday morning, five of us, we want to come over and see this machine."
I thought, "Great!" So I told the engineers that you know this thing's got to be working on Monday morning. (he laughs) It's very important." When I got to the office early Monday morning, it was not working. This was a hardwired machine, by the way. This is the kind of thing we went through almost on a daily basis for a while. I told George Chastain that I would have them come into the conference room and I'd give them a little history of Docutel, a little history about the idea, the concept, automatic tellers, and so on. And then we'd go and get a demonstration. I left the door ajar a little bit and I said, "George, periodically you walk up and down that aisle and if the machine is down, do this [he points his thumb down], if it's up, then I'll know to break it off and we'll go in."
Well, I started out, I went through the course of our history and George came by about twice and gave me the old "down" signal. So I went around again; same thing again. Did this for about an hour and a half. Finally this executive vice president says, "I know more about Docutel now than you do. This machine isn't working, right?" I said, "That's right, it's not working." He said, "That's OK, let us look at it anyhow." I said, "OK."
So we went out into the lab and we showed them the machine. And they understood what we were doing and they could visually see that we were serious. We were going to build this machine. The only problem was, it wasn't working. And you know -- "the money came out here, you put the card in here, here's the dispenser" and all of that -- we showed them the guts of the machine. It never did work that day. They went back to Atlanta. In two days I received a phone call and they ordered five. Now, this was a very progressive bank. It's still around today and it's still a very progressive bank.
But those are the kinds of things we went through. Kind of nerve-wracking at times. You never knew what the end result was going to be. But we did get away from that hardwired machine. And we went to a mini-computer, what we know as computers today. That really solved our electronic problems.
David: Before we get into the installation on Long Island, let me just ask you about the patent.
Don: Well, the company filed in 1970 for the patent on the ATM and the patent, as I recall, was for a machine that dispensed money at the request of a person who had a plastic card with a properly encoded magnetic stripe or something like that. We reapplied. Apparently it wasn't worded properly or something was not clear. We had a lawyer at the company, by the way, and he reapplied in 1971. We found out, I guess it was about this time, that there was a company in California, I believe, who had produced on a very small scale a plastic card with a magnetic stripe. Docutel worked out something where their objection was satisfied, so the patent to Docutel was issued in 1973. But it was not a totally exclusive-type patent that you can get on some products. That's my understanding of it.
David: The way you told the story, you made the internal design, using existing technology for the pieces. Did you follow other people involved in doing something pretty similar that you drew on? Or did you mostly follow your own model?
Don: Well, you know the product that we developed was exactly that: we developed it. I don't know what the company did with the stripe out in California but it was a very minuscule type of thing. I feel like we developed the magnetic stripe on a plastic card. We didn't personally develop it, we pushed it on a plastic card manufacturer to develop it. So I would think that we were responsible for those stripes on plastic cards that we all see today. There were machines that gave out coins. You put a dollar in and it gave out coins. Ours was a little different but it was a dispensing mechanism, so there was nothing unique to that. A lot of printers were out there. Some very sophisticated ones, some not so sophisticated. We had to modify whatever was there to fit our needs. So I can't say that we went from nowhere to what we had, and we developed it all.
David: But you had a unique way of putting the pieces together.
Don: Right.
David: Now, you talked some about the development -- as you began to look for customers for this technology, what was that process like? We talked earlier on just the marketing or the original development stage some of the resistance or concerns. How had you found that you had pieces and people began to come look at -- what was the general reaction to innovation that you guys were putting together?
Don: Well, it was mixed. We went out initially and talked to bankers that we knew. We had, like, this banker was on the board, and we had some other executives on the board from other companies and they knew bankers. The president of our company was an ex-IBMer. The executive vice president of REI was an ex-IBMer. So we used various contacts to go to those people first, and for the most part these were either senior operating people or they were executives, most of them, in the larger banks. These were our initial contacts. And that's how we got to meet the proper people at Chemical Bank.
Early on, I was the person who did that. We didn't have a marketing force at that point in time. We didn't have any salesmen, so I was the one that went out and perhaps you know the story. I had this cardboard mockup of the machine and I carried that on my lap on airplanes and went to New York and Atlanta and Minneapolis and San Francisco and all those kind of places, to actually show them what this machine was going to look like. We had little places on it where, you know, "here's the card reader and here's the keys where you key in your PIN number," et cetera.
So they could visualize just exactly what they would get if they ordered this machine. The reaction, as I said, was mixed. There were some who thought it was a crazy idea and some of the progressive-minded bankers who were really wanting to get into the retail business. They thought it might have merit. And those were the ones to whom we were saying, "Come on down to Dallas and we'll show this thing, we're not kidding, we're serious about it, we are building it, and we'd like to sell you some." That was the effort at that point in time.
David: Was the resistance along lines that earlier people were thinking of a personal service as opposed to a mechanized service? Or were there other types of reasons?
Don: There were basically two reasons. That was one, the other one was cost. You know, they were thinking in terms of -- a lot of them related this to a typewriter. "A typewriter only costs $600. You guys are talking $18,000? When I've got a row of tellers in here now doing the same thing? You know, I don't see why we ought to spend that kind of money." And of course that was just for the machine, you had to pay for maintenance and you had to install it, and it was very important -- and we stressed this very much -- that you really had to promote it. Just sticking it in the wall wouldn't cut it. We had designed posters that they could buy and use, we had a video that we would show to the tellers to train them as to what to tell the customers. We had mockups of the machine that we put in the lobby so that one of the customer personnel at the bank, as their customer came through the teller line, they would ask the person to come over to this new device. This was after they had bought some but hadn't installed them yet. They'd take them over there to the model and show them how it would work.
So there were some expenses involved in the promotion of this, and we had to make sure that they understood that. The thing that helped us the most eventually, I guess, was we came up with a sales tool that showed the institution basically that if they obtained x-number of new demand deposit customers and x-number of savings account customers, that would offset the cost of the machine, and not only offset the cost but make them money. And we would ask them, each individual bank, how much they netted off of a DDA account or savings account annually, and they gave us their numbers. Once they gave us those numbers, then it was a simple mathematical thing we had to go through that said if you get x-number of new accounts, here's how much money you're going to earn.
At that time they were really out to get those customers, and offering a service that the bank down the street didn't have helped us tremendously in the beginning. "Be the first! Get those machines in, you have something the other banks don't have, and all you need is x-number and you have a real winner." And that's why the majority of the early users bought. Then it was follow the leader. "If he's got it, then we better get it." So the next bank ordered it. That's the way the sales cycle went. And then at some point in time there was no analysis made. "We've got to have 'em, it doesn't mattter what the cost is, we have to have 'em because we're not going to keep our customers and we're not going to get any new ones."
David: Why Chemical Bank?
Don: Well, Chemical Bank was one of the banks that loaned money to REI, so the chairman of REI knew some key people there and he got me in the front door. That's how it all started. The people I talked with kind of liked the idea and they said, "Let's do it."
David: You installed it first in a lobby, was it also 24 hours or was it just --
Don: No, it wasn't in a lobby, it was actually in the wall of the bank, out on the street. They put a canopy over it to protect it from the rain and the weather of all sorts. Unfortunately they put the canopy too high and the rain came under it. (laughing) One time we had water in the machine and we had to do some extensive repairs. It was a walkup on the outside of the bank. That was the first one. And it was a cash dispenser only, not a full ATM.
David: I'm sure your engineers took on the line for a couple of months?
Don: Oh absolutely. We had them up there just standing by even when (he laughs) it was working. And we had to provide local service, so that's when we started to hire our own maintenance team. We started to hire salesmen about that time or slightly before. So now we're getting into the marketing/servicing/promotion. I remember the big ad that Chemical put in the Long Island News or whatever that paper is out there. "Our branch at such-and-such a location will open on September" -- I'm not sure of the date but I thought it was September 3 -- "will open its doors at 9 a.m. and never close again." That was a big full-page deal. And that's how they kicked off the program.
That gets back to the point I made earlier. You had to promote it in order to get people to use it. And a lot of people had to come in and ask for a card, I mean, they just didn't give cards to everybody, because at this point in time, you see, these were credit cards, we put stripes on a credit card. There were no ATM card or a debit card. So they picked the people that they wanted to use it. Remember, we're still off-line, so they wanted to give them to good customers, people that they felt comfortable with who wouldn't abuse the privilege.
David: What was the reaction to the machine in that community?
Don: Well, I'd have to say it was favorable because shortly thereafter the bank ordered some more. I think the bank was pleased and I think the customers were happy.
David: You don't remember any particular glitches ..... the canopy? Was that the worst problem you had --
Don: The worst problem we had, there was a driving rainstorm and water came through a crack in the facia. We had a facia that was sort of angled and then a little shelf down below that went around, and for some reason water got through there -- it wasn't supposed to -- and it got down into the pan where the mini was and that destroyed the mini. We eventually had to replace it, but we were down for probably a couple of days. And that was not a good time to be down for two days, especially when you're talking about the bank opens at nine and (laughing) never closes again! But we fixed it, and the bank understood. This was the first machine. They knew that there were going to be some problems and we didn't know exactly what they were going to be, but for the most part the machine worked well and the customers started to use it. And as they saw it building up, I think that gave the bank confidence enough to expand the program.
And then the selling job becomes a lot easier when you have one installed and a banker can talk to another banker, not to the salesman who's saying all these neat things. He gets what he considers the really true story. And then that makes the next sale easier. From then on it started to move pretty good.
David: Did you stay within your $4 million or whatever the original stake was, or was it more expensive than you expected?
Don: I think we were very close to it. We may have exceeded it a little bit, maybe by about $5 million, something like that, but we were pretty much on target. We were watched very closely by REI. You know, at that time REI was a very sophisticated image-processing company, one of the leaders in the world as a matter of fact. So they had a pretty good idea what hardware should do and could do. They watched the dollars. So we had them looking over our shoulders on a regular basis. It was very important that we build this machine, deliver it on time, and make it work.
David: It looks like you were under a lot of pressure.
Don: (laughing) Well, you might say this was not the color of my hair then.
David: Do you remember it being real stressful or is it more exciting -- how do you remember that period?
Don: No, I remember it as exciting. I used to get frustrated because things didn't happen as fast as I wanted them to. As I recall we delayed delivery of the machine, like, 30 days, and that was upsetting, because obviously it was delayed because it wasn't working properly. That kind of thing for any marketing person is very disturbing. But for the most part it was more exciting than it was frustrating, because you could see the interest building. Even before the installation of the first machine, as I made my sales calls, just seeing these bankers say, "You know, that sounds pretty good, but I'd like to see one installed first." Or "Yeah, I'd like to come down to Dallas." We had a lot of people coming down to the plant to see this prototype.[/1]
[i]And then once we got a few orders and started a production line, then it really became exciting. Because then we could take them over to the plant and we could say, "Now, if you ordered, this would be the machine that you would get, but you're not going to get this one over here, this is going to Chase Manhattan."
David: So you began to pick up orders pretty raidly out there, the original --
Don: Right. It really moved good. We had some who wanted to wait for what at that time we called "the total teller." We had a cash dispenser, and then the next version was going to be the total teller, which is the ATM we all know today -- takes deposits, transfers money from checking to savings, savings to checking, cash advances to your credit card, takes payments; things like that. So they didn't want just a cash dispenser alone.
David: And the so-called total teller, did you have an off-line version of that? Or did they have to be on-line?
Don: No, as a matter of fact it was off-line at first. Didn't have to be on-line, it was the same principle. The key to the security of the off-line, in my opinion, was this encryption that we did on the magnetic stripe. Every time the card was used, we manipulated the bits on the stripe, so they never went back in the same place they were before. And we had some coded bits that if they were in a certain location, that meant that Formula A was used in order to read it properly. If they were in another location after it was used, then Formula B was used. So that we made it very difficult for anyone to decode the data. I don't know of anybody who actually broke the code from copying cards and could just keep on using them and get money out. That was really a key to the success.
David: The whole security ....
Don: Right. Because we were off-line at the time. And the PIN was actually on the stripe, and the thought was, well, if somebody can decode the data on the stripe, then you had all the data you'd need and you could go make cards and just run them and run them and run them. Now, of course, the PIN is not on the stripe since we're on-line.
David: So I can envision how this began to unfold. What were your problems as you began to be began to be more successful?
Don: Well, our biggest problem was our success. The time that we had a financial crisis on our hands was when we had the largest back order we ever had. We just didn't have the cash to pay the bills because we had all these orders and we'd gone into production and bought all this equipment and supplies to build and meet the delivery schedules. And the cash wasn't there because you know what happens -- you do not get the money as soon as you get the orders; you get the money even after it's installed for a period of time. So I'd say that probably was our most severe problem at one point in time.
We had a marvelous vice president of manufacturing, he was very good -- he came from TI, as I said, and had a lot of experience. So we could get the machines out at a pretty rapid clip. The problem was more financial than it was anything else. Then we started to bring on people. We had regional offices in a number of sections of the country, with managers and salesmen and service personnel. So it really took off very well.
David: And you stayed with that for a while as you went forth from that early development?
Don: I had a personal setback in 1970. My wife died of cancer. I remarried in 1972. My wife then, who was also a widow, had eight children. When we got married we wound up with 12 children. And I was doing an awful lot of traveling. I traveled almost every week somewhere, and it seemed like every time I hit the road and called home, something had happened -- you know, so-and-so broke his finger, or the principal wants to meet with you next Monday; something like that. She was trying to run this household with 12 kids running around and they were all at home.
So I decided, in '73, that this was rather unfair and I really needed to stay home. So it was in '73 that I resigned from Docutel, and started my first company, called Financial Systems & Equipment.
David: An unusual decision for a man to make at that time.
Don: Well, it really was. Because we were at our heyday then, in '73. It was great. And I really enjoyed it, I really did. I didn't mind traveling, I really enjoyed selling, and it was exciting, a whole new idea, you know. I even traveled overseas, so I was having an awful lot of fun as well. But I realized that I just couldn't keep on doing that. So that's when I started the other company.
David: And you were able to resume your commitment to your family, then, with that decision.
Don: Right.
David: That's very admirable. And how did the next company work out?
Don: Well, it started out slow. I made a decision at that time -- I was getting a little bit burned out with computers. What with IBM all those years, and then Docutel and going through those phases there, I decided that I was going to try something different. I would not sell anything that was computerized. And my background being around banks, I decided I would sell bank equipment but not computerized banking equipment.
I became a manufacturer's representative and I sold products like vault doors, safe deposit boxes, drive-up motor banks, and under-counter equipment, plain old vanilla stuff. You didn't have to be a mental giant, really, you just had to make a lot of sales calls and get in there and convince people your products were good. And that went well, it was a little slow at the beginning but later on it went well and the company was around for probably 18 years. While that was going on, I started a second company -- and this was about five years later, in 1978 -- called Electronic Banking Systems, with a former Docutel salesman. We did a lot of consulting work with companies and banks that were in the ATM business, so we got back into it again.
I believe we were the first company that put ATMs in supermarkets. We had devised a formula that we would buy the machines from the manufacturers, we would place them in supermarkets, and we would charge so much a transaction and the supermarkets would get so much. That's how we started working with the switching companies like Cirrus. That went very well, in fact so well that in 1984 we were bought by Docutel. (he laughs) So it all came back around in circles.
Docutel bought our company Electronic Banking systems and my partner and I went to work for Docutel. I had hired a president for Financial Systems and Equipment and we had all the people -- the sales and service and administrative personnel. Two companies were going on until we sold Electronic Banking Systems to Docutel and part of the deal was we had to go to work for Docutel, for a short period of time at least.
Before we sold Electronic Banking Systems, in 1979 I started a third company called Autosig Systems, Inc. That is a company, it still exists, that markets an electronic signature verification system that we sell to the financial community. I'm chairman of the board of that right now and it's still in existence. In 1989 I retired.
David: I have to say, it's an unusual person who'd quit the job, and then to have more time with his family, start three companies.
Don: (laughing) Well, I was home most of the time -- at least I was in Dallas most of the time.
David: You apparently were able to do this while keeping time for your family, or --
Don: Oh yeah, I did a little bit of travel, I wasn't home all the time and that probably helped our marriage somewhat. But I was home an awful lot more than I was when I traveled with Docutel, because with them I was gone, usually on a Monday morning and back on Friday. With the other companies I didn't do a whole lot of travel -- you know, when a salesman had a situation on his hands and you could parade in somebody who supposedly knows a lot, that's the kind of trip I would make. So it worked out very well, for me and my family, I think.
David: And did you enjoy the freedom of starting your own companies?
Don: It was exciting, it really was exciting. Of course I'd never done anything like that. I'd always worked for substantial companies, knew when the paycheck was going to come, it was going to be so much, would come on a certain day, -- great. But you know when you're working for yourself, you just don't know those things. So there was a certain amount of uncertainty involved in this. There were times when I was kind of nervous because I had a lot of responsibilities at home. But it all worked out well and the money has been good for me over the years.
David: And I would assume your earlier successes had given you some financial --
Don: Had a little bit of cushion -- and being a manufacturer's rep with the first company, I was able to work out some deals with them where they paid me up front for a period of time which let me get established. That worked out well and was very essential as it turned out to be. Because I tell everybody now, you work up your plan, your budget, and whatever you come up with, you triple your expenses and you halve your revenue and that's probably what's going to happen the first year.
David: Now, Don, you've seen American industry and the computer industry from a lot of different perspectives. You've been very successful. One of the things we're really interested in, and the Smithsonian is studying, is how innovation works in the government -- in particular, how young people are innovative in their perspectives and seeing what it's been like for other people.
If you were to talk to young people who want to go off and try something new, do something new, what would be your advice to them?
Don: I think, first of all, the pleasure you get out of trying something that is innovative and something that you thought of, is very exciting, and it can be very rewarding. Most of the time it is. Sometimes it's not but most of the time it is.
I also think that the climate, especially today, is very receptive to innovative thinking. The way we do business in the United States, the way corporations and people are receptive to new ideas now -- I think that's totally different from the way it used to be. The chances of success are much greater now than they used to be. You know, good ideas are always received well but nowadays I think, in our world, a person who would like to try something new ought to very definitely try it and get out there and do it. It takes hard work and it takes a lot of persistence but it really pays off most of the time.
David: Any secrets in terms of how to work -- it seems like you learned a lot about the use of your ideas before you went in for development --
Don: I think it's very important to do your homework. I've talked to a number of people who had ideas but they really hadn't done any homework. Yes, it's great to have a great idea but you have to know what the potential for that idea is. You also have to know how much money it is going to take to develop that idea. And if you don't do those things, you may come up with the best product in the world and nobody will ever buy it. So it's a waste of time and very discouraging.
David: Anything else that you think of we should report for the record here about this innovation and your role in it?
Don: I really think the future holds many great possibilities. I think the ATM was the first instance where a person had the opportunity to interface with a piece of machinery, and that allowed that person then to be comfortable with interfacing to other pieces that came out since then -- like PCs, as an example, and we all know the success of the PC. I think we're going to see much, much more of that happening in the future.
I think people nowadays and in the future are going to have the opportunity to not only come up with a lot of new products but also to be able to use those products in ways they never dreamed of. The future, without a doubt, is going to be more exciting than the past.
David: Do you have any concern about interfacing with equipment rather than people?
Don: I don't in the broad sense. Not at all. The only reservation I have is that when you have access to things that might be morally decaying, and I guess I'm referring directly to Internet right now. I believe that would be bad. I think in certain areas to some extent proper controls need to be there to make sure bad things don't happen as a result of interfacing with equipment.
David: Don, we want to thank you for your time and your willingness to talk to us. I think you've given a terrific record.
Don: It's been my pleasure, David, to be here and to be part of the Smithsonian and having the ATM here.
END OF INTERVIEW
This week's Bits & Bytes column: http://www.herald-journal.com/archives/2009/columns/mo083109.html
The Bits_blogger
Have a Great Week!
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Web Site of The Week for September 14 2009
by bits_blogger » Sun Sep 13, 2009 1:47 pm
Web Site of The Week
LRO camera takes first look at Apollo 12 landing site! The Surveyor 3 spacecraft, Lunar Module descent stage, and
Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Package (ALSEP) along with astronaut tracks (unmarked arrows) are all visible in this
image of the Apollo 12 landing site.
Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University
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Web Site of The Week for September 21 2009
by bits_blogger » Sun Sep 20, 2009 1:26 pm
Web Site of The Week:
Project Icarus journeys to the edge of space
Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh are students attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Sept. 2, the two launched their balloon containing a camera from Sturbridge Massachusetts
where it rose to a height of 93,000 feet or 17.61 miles, which technically puts it into the
stratosphere.
“We are a group of MIT students seeking to share the artistic aspects of science with others.
On Sept. 2, 2009, we launched a digital camera into near-space to take photographs of the
earth from high up above,” a statement on their web site says.
The two students used a helium-filled latex balloon, a Canon A47 camera, four lithium AA
batteries, and a Motorola i290 “Boost Mobile” prepaid cell phone with internet and Global
Positioning System (GPS) capability (which acted as the balloon’s GPS receiver). The
software program used by the two students with the GPS receiver was called “Accutracking,”
which reported its GPS location.
They knew their balloon and equipment needed to rise to an altitude high enough to take
the photographs from the edge of space and withstand the challenging temperatures of the
stratosphere. They also needed to be able to track and recover the camera when it came
back to earth.
To combat the extreme cold in the stratosphere, the two students cleverly used a Styrofoam
cooler which contained hand warmers that were tightly fitted against the electronic
components kept inside the cooler. This kept their equipment functioning throughout the
Camera’s flight.
Oliver Yeh, Justin Lee, Eric Newton
BELOW ARE THE AMAZING PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN FROM THEIR CAMERA AS IT APPROACHED
NEAR-SPACE! ALSO SHOWN IS WHEN THE BALLOON "POPPED" AT ITS MAXIMUM ALTITUDE OF
93,000 FEET!
_____________ALL OF THE ABOVE PHOTOGRAPHS WERE USED WITH THE PERMISSION OF OLIVER YEH, JUSTIN LEE, ERIC NEWTON AND 1337arts.com
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Web Site of The Week for September 28 2009
by bits_blogger » Sun Sep 27, 2009 3:39 pm
Web Site of The Week
BELOW IS NASA'S IDEA FOR SOLAR POWER TRANSMISSIONS FROM SPACE TO EARTH:
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Web Site of The Week for October 5 2009
by bits_blogger » Sun Oct 04, 2009 3:43 pm
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Web Site of The Week for October 12 2009
by bits_blogger » Sun Oct 11, 2009 3:14 pm
__Vinton G. Cerf - Internet
Widely known as one of the "Fathers of the Internet,"
Cerf is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and
the architecture of the Internet. In December 1997,
President Clinton presented the U.S. National Medal
of Technology to Cerf and his partner, Robert Kahn,
for founding and developing the Internet. Kahn and
Cerf were named the recipients of the ACM Alan M.
Turing award in 2004 for their work on the Internet
protocols. The Turing award is sometimes called the
"Nobel Prize of Computer Science."
Prior to rejoining MCI in 1994, Cerf was vice president
of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives
(CNRI). As vice president of MCI Digital Information
Services from 1982-1986, he led the engineering of
MCI Mail, the first commercial email service to be
connected to the Internet.
During his tenure from 1976-1982 with the U.S.
Department of Defense's Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA), Cerf played a key
role leading the development of Internet and
Internet-related data packet and security
technologies.
Source: icannwiki.org
__
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