The Magnetic Stripe Card

ESSAY
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(July 24, 2012)
THE MAGNETIC STRIPE CARD
The magnetic stripe card invention came up as a result of the increasing number of customers for the airlines following their first orders for the wide body aircraft the 747 and DC-10 making the number of customers to increase dramatically. Due to the increase the service at the counter was becoming chaotic and they had to find ways to speed up ticket sales and passenger processing. To end this problem without hiring more staff both the bank and the airline had to help customers serve themselves through computers.
The banks adopted the ATM and the airlines came up with a kiosk that would track reservations and dispense boarding passes. The answer to all these issues was the magnetic stripe card developed by the IBM in the 70s and spread through the globe in 80s and it has become one of the most successful technologies. The researchers charged with creating a new computer application came up with the card that could be multi used for banks and airlines. IBM assumed that the more transactions made through the machine readable media the more the computer sales to process them and this strategy worked beyond dreams.
The possible options were the use of bar codes as well as perforated paper tape. IBM rejected the idea of bar codes and settled for the magnetic used by computers as storage means the reason being only the magnetic technology would allow the engineers to fit all the data they needed onto the strip. The data included alphabetic information and numeric information. The invention was brought to reality with IBMs worlds` first magnetic credit card a piece of card board with a magnetic strip. The design of the card included to get the magnetic material from iron oxide and stick it at the back of the card, the developers needed a binder that when heate...