Sometimes honesty is the best policy
Who, Me? A step back in time for today’s Who, Me? with a trip to the dying days of manual credit card imprinting and a coding cock-up to redden the cheeks of the new, online systems. John, our latest confessor, and was working on one of the UK’s very first Electronic Funds Transfer at Point Of Sale systems (EFTPOS) during the early 1990s. His customer was a then-major electrical retailer, with a dizzying 500+ branches across the country. Automatic credit card authorisation was part of the deal as the existing system was hopelessly manual. Imprinting machines were used to record details, and transactions over a certain amount required a telephone call. The wait for authorisation was not popular. «Also,» added John, «each branch received a daily list of known fraudulent cards that staff were supposed to check against; but the list was always out-of date.» The whizzy new EFTPOS system, running on the mighty OS/2, could do all this electronically via a X.25 network. The person facing the customer would get an immediate response and not even have to thumb through the naughty card number list. John pulled the relevant data specifications from his local library and had the card authorisation component up, running and validated ahead of an October roll-out and code-freeze.
