In memorium: the magnetic stripe

Magnetic stripes have had their day. At one time they were top of the line technology. They were used to store data on early computers and to store audio recordings dating back to the days of World War II. If you are old enough, you may have had a reel-to-reel audio player to play all of those cool tunes that you were into.
With its myriad of uses as a storage medium it was only natural that it should expand onto credit cards. In 1969 an IBM engineer named Forrest Parry did just that, with a little help from his wife Dorothea and her clothing iron, which was just hot enough to attach the strip to the back of a plastic card. With that bit of ironing the modern credit card was born. By 1971 the first service center was opened and the first validation terminal was on the market, both offered by IBM. They also began mass encoding the stripes and mass embossing the cards around that time as well.
Standards were set in place for the information placed on the magnetic strips. One track of data was encoded onto the stripe using IBM’s Delta Distance C Optical Bar Code, which became the international standard and is known today as the UPC or Uniform Product Code. An IBM 360 computer with a whopping 50KB of RAM was used to encode the information onto the stripes.
This technology was used for more than just simply bank cards and credit cards. Hotels began to use them for guest rooms as they would only work with one lock in the hotel. Along the same lines they were great for security badges to easily restrict or allow people into certain areas. Airlines used them for their ticketing. ID cards were issued with them (check your driver’s license or passport). They were useful for transit cards since they could be updated quickly. The one downside was that there was no easy way to mass encrypt data onto them to make it more secure.
But now computer chips are making magnetic stripes go the way of the dodo bird. They have outlived their usefulness. When the stripes were designed in 1969 there was no way Forrest Parry could have envisioned that they would still be in use today or how much trouble they would be causing the American public with their credit cards.