4 Jan
2008
4 Jan
'08
5:53 a.m.
jd wrote:
Jules Richardson wrote:
Weird. I've certainly seen at least one UK ATM fall over and break out of its
program (this was quite a few years ago) - but I'm amazed that anyone would
design an ATM in such a way that the keypad buttons were directly readable by
the native OS for just that reason.
(Having said that, some ATM machines in the UK
ran OS/2 for years after
it was a dead OS elsewhere -
[snipsnip] )
It's been used in some ATM's in the States, too. People have mentioned
getting to the desktop or a shell and manipulating ATM's from there,
somehow. Apparently there's nothing better on the shelf.
I'd heard that too, but I don't know how much of it's folklore. I suspect
these days they all just run MS Windows, and any increase in failure rate is
seen to be cheaper to handle than trying to support a 'dead' OS.
(Although I'd expect a BSD variant to be more reliable, have a smaller
footprint, be equal to Windows in support terms, and lend itself better to the
embedded nature of an ATM)
Are there any vintage ATM collectors on the list? ;)
cheers
Jules