At 02:01 PM 10/31/98 -0800, you wrote: I wrote the code for the first on-line ATM in the United States. This was in 1973. I worked for IBM at the time. It was in Califon NJ at Hunterton County Trust Company a monster of an 18 million dollar asset bank. There is a very high degree of sophistication and algorithms to make sure that only the authorized person gets the money and that the information is properly recorded at the bank. In the original days the information was recorded on the magnetic stripe on the card (on the off-line machines). At the time I was involved they used a fairly sophisticated phone line technology but I'm sure it is even more so at this time. The IBM BiSync ATM was remote to an IBM System 7 where the authorization and logging was done. The disk pack (looked like Star Trex Enterprise) was carried over to an IBM System 3 where the transactions were posted to accounts and new info put on pack to bring back to the machine. Up to this time all ATM's were off-line and hot card postings had to be entered in each and every machine. Keeping track of withdraws was done on the mag stripe and subject to fraud. At the time hot cards were posted transactions were picked up (often from paper tape). I remember one time on a competitors machine over $10,000 of transactions were posted on a single line of a jammed adding machine tape. gene@ehrich http://www.voicenet.com/~generic Computer & Video Game Garage Sale