Path: utzoo!mnetor!tmsoft!torsqnt!hybrid!scifi!bywater!uunet!bu.edu!telecom-request From: roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Payment Processing Message-ID: Date: 25 Feb 91 03:07:31 GMT Sender: news@bu.edu.bu.edu Organization: Public Health Research Institute, New York City Lines: 33 Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 157, Message 5 of 10 > If you couldn't prove the batch in about ten minutes, you would hold the > batch in the computer, and pass it to Sara. Sara had the eyes of an > eagle or a hawk and could find anything. I remember taking a tour of a local NJBell plant in the early 70's. I remember watching them keypunch the incoming bill payments. I don't remember the whole deal, but I do remember a machine which looked basically like a 029 keypunch (was it a 129?) but instead of punching, it just did comparisons. You put into the feed hopper a deck of cards already punched by somebody else. You then proceeded to repunch the same data. If any keystroke you made didn't match what was already on the card, a light lit up (or something like that). I also remember the gazillion-channel paper billing tapes generated by the switches. But, the neatest thing I remember was the automatic envelope stuffing machines. After they were stuffed, they were sealed and run through a postage meter (with some sort of gate to throw out the overweight ones to get extra postage). My devious twelve year old mind had visions at the time of pushing all the levers on the postage meter to nine and putting $99.99 of postage on each envelope (I confess, I confess!). > PS: Trivia: Who remembers Unicard? What banks pushed it? What did it > grow into? What was the logo? How about the jingle? Isn't Unicard what became Mastercharge? I remember when it came out in, oh, must have been around 1968 or so. Don't remember any details. Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016 roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu -OR- {att,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy