The arrival of the magnetic stripe changed all that. Credit card companies would circulate a list of bad account numbers each month, and the merchant would have to compare the customers’ cards against the list. (They were also dubbed “knuckle-busters” by the unfortunate clerks who skinned their fingers on the embossing plate.)Īnd how could clerks tell whether the customer was good for the purchase? They couldn’t.
Later, they used flatbed imprinting machines to record the card information on carbon paper packets, the sound of the swiping of the handle earning them the name, zip-zap machines. In the early age of modern credit cards, they had to write down account information for each card-carrying customer by hand.
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