Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
France, but also in major industrial countries around the globe. By 1977, the
first commercial developers of an IC card product were three manufacturers,
Bull CP8, SGS Thompson, and Schlumberger. Also, in that year, the French
bankingsystem had a smart card payment scheme in place, and by 1978 the
first prototype card was produced. In 1979, Motorola introduced the first secure
individual chip microcontroller. It was a prototype made in Toulouse, France
for Bull CP8, havingprogrammable 1-K memory and microprocessor 6805.
Credit cards contain data includingeither sinature or picture for identifi-
cation of the person authorized to use it for account access or services. The use
of credit cards, on a local scale, actually goes back to the 1920s in the United
States, when some oil companies and hotel chains started issuingthem to cus-
tomers for purchases at their enterprises. On a global scale, the first credit card
for use at a large multiplicity of businesses was Diners Club Inc., in 1950. Their
card employed PVC plastic, which replaced earlier paper-based cards. They
were the first to institute charging an annual fee billed to their cardholders. By
1958, American Express entered the stage with its card. The first bank to issue
a card was the Bank of America in 1959 with its
BankAmericard
distributed
initially in California only, addingother states startingin 1966. In 1976, it was
renamed VISA,
9.29
and later MasterCard followed suit. In 1981, MasterCard
(formerly called Master Charge), introduced the first gold-card program, and in
1983 it was the first to employ a laser hologram as an antifraud mechanism.
The 1980s saw much field testingof smart cards. The world's first significant
IC card test was conducted in France with their testingof serial memory phone
cards in 1982. In 1983, the first nationwide smart card scheme was put in place
by the French for their public telephone payment system (see [45]). In 1984,
the French adopted the Bull CP8 card as their standard for the first version of
their bank debit cards Carte Bleue. By 1986, the French also were the first to
introduce a smart card scheme in the form of a health card. In 1987, the ISO
introduced the first card standards in the form of ISO/IEC 7816-X. The 7816
series of standards today define everythingfrom the physical shape of the card
to the format the commands may take when sendingto or responses from the
card. This includes not only the functionality of the card, but also the very
position and shape of the electrical connectors and the protocols definingthe
power voltages to be applied to them (see Diagrams 9.6 and 9.7).
By the early 1990s the French were involved in field testingof combi-cards.
Also in the early 1990s, Germany was involved in memory card distribution on
a mass scale. In 1994, they started the distribution of some 80 million serial
memory chip citizen health cards. Now, every German citizen has a health
smart card. By the mid-1990s, mobile phone use was conducted and paid via
smart cards by some three million users. By the late 1990s, the major players in
the credit card industry were lookingat standards for interoperability. In 1996,
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Internationally, BankAmericard was known by other names before VISA came into being.
In Canada, a number of banks, in concert, issued Chargex cards. In the U.K., the BarclayCard
was issued by Barclay's Bank. Both of the latter used the blue-white-blue motif familiar to
BankAmericard holders. The blue and gold motif on the VISA cards was selected to represent
the blue sky and gold-coloured hills of California, where BankAmericard originated.
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