Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!pacbell!att!chinet!mcdchg!ddsw1!ddsw1!vpnet!jms
From: jms@vpnet.UUCP (Jon Schattke)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Magnetic encoding on cards.
Message-ID: <[602.5]comp.sys.ibm.pc;1@vpnet.UUCP>
Date: 22 Jul 89 10:00:10 GMT
References: <2549NU013809@NDSUVM1> <569@atlas.tegra.UUCP>
Lines: 23

>From: jimb@athertn.Atherton.COM [Jim Burke]
>In article <4181@ima.ima.isc.com> johnl@ima.ima.isc.com (John R. Levine)
>writes:

>This is interesting.  I happened to stop at a gas station near Clear Lake
>California a few weeks ago and they used magnetic stripe technology to 
>operate their gas pumps.
>The pump
>must write to the card in order to erase the credit.  It seems like there
>is room for abuse for this system if card reader/recorder devices were
>readily available unless they used one heck-of-an encryption scheme on
>the cards.  Still, it is an interesting concept.
It would be much easier to have the pump computers merely talk to the main
computer about your account.  The card is merely a way of keeping the
account number in a transportable and transferrable way.  The card would
never have to be written on site.  You could even have multiple cards for
families.

Remember the cardinal rule of computing and engineering: Keep it simple.
---
Jonathan Mark Schattke	                        There is _always_ one more bug.
jms@vpnet.UUCP	                If u cn rd ths, u 2 cn bcum a prgrmr & mk bg $.
      VPNET is a free-to-users public-access system in a Chicago Suburb.