… should have been in the headline says a Mr S Rider.

Many years ago I was travelling for work and needed to get some cash from a machine in Cambridge (branch of HSBC, I think).

I put my card in, but, before I was asked for my PIN, the screen went blank - followed shortly after by the startup screen for "OS/2 Warp".

I had to wait for it to boot to be sure that it would retain my card (it did) rather than pop it out some time later.

Not a good day as it was before internet banking was mature, so I had no way to get cash until a replacement card arrived.

1. OS2 Warp, wow that's rare. Security by obscurity is strong with this one.

2. Machines that take your credit card COMPLETELY out of your hands were banned from Brazil very quickly, reasons unknown. Back in the 80's they were very common. I guess it was easier for fraudsters to force the ATM to hold your CC hostage for their advantage. They use the half-input these days, just enough to read the onboard chip, while still allowing the owner to forcibly yank it off for any reason.

It used to be possible to jam a piece of plastic into the card slot, the plastic would be shaped so that it grabbed your card on the way out so a thief could retrieve it after you'd given up and left.

I wonder if that's why?

Surprisingly detailed description here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebanese_loop

OS/2 Warp - powered ATMs were much snappier and more responsive on 200mhz hardware than XP-embedded ATMs with 1.2 GHz hardware with all the peripherals the same. And they didn't die if they were power cycled. OS/2 FTW!!

Naturally, management observed that OS/2 worked faster and more reliably on cheaper hardware and so moved heaven and earth to throw money at Microsoft and upgrade the ATMs to XP embedded.

OS/2 was used for years in all kinds of dedicated hardware from cash machines to supermarket checkouts to pretty much everything in an airport. As an OS it was much more reliable than DOS and could be run on much more modest hardware than Windows NT. But, coming from IBM, it was simply better for task of communicatiing with a remote server, which is the main job of any kind of terminal.

As for taking cards "completely out of your hands" that was presumably to the fairly common practice of copying the magnetic strip.

Our town has some Linux-based electronic bus schedule/status displays. I know they're Linux-based because I've occasionally seen their text-mode boot-up displays, forlornly trying, and failing to get IP.

Muoppet Shuo, Kermeet zee-a Frug. Gunzu zee-a Greet! Bork Bork Bork!

https://funtranslations.com/chef

Userid - 23646

Password - 23646

Admin

Admin

Gotta be worth a try?

I seem to remember that Microsoft makes a separate branch of the OS specifically for ATMs, which is more locked down and gets support for far longer than the regular versions. So this might be only bad, rather than outright terrible.

Hmmmm ... guess it won't run Crysis then; but what about Pac-Man? ;)

Long time ago when British Olivetti did the maintenance work for Barclays I did indeed play games on an NCR ATM motherboard, they were custom 486 and Pentium designs but were still, at core, a PC which you could boot into DOS and Windows or OS/2

It was also fun testing the note dispensers with stacks of test currency, at least for the first few times.

During the very early noughties my local Sainsburys (supermarket) had eight or so ATMs from, maybe, five different banks. Then all the machines were boarded over. "What's going on 'ere?", I thought. For weeks they were covered. Quite annoying, as there were no other ATMs for a half hour walk. Finally, I see from a distance some bright, shinny new ATMs. But, wait! What's this? They all seem to be displaying the same UI... A blue UI. A blue that we all know and love, or fear (each to their own!). Yep - all of the units were BSOD... for about another two months! So, no cash, but I did feel enriched!

"Manchester (or "Madchester" to readers of a certain age)"

Judging by the state of that machine, Mankchester would seem more apt.

-A.

"Hand-job on Temperance Street - An image of a couple performing a sex act on Temperance Street, Manchester, England, has been deleted from Google Street View, after the picture was spotted by users."

It's grim up t'north.

As an, admittedly ex-pat, Mancunian, I've always taken a certain amount of pride in the black humour of the everyday including the crime, the sordid and the depraved: from Les Dawson's immortal "It was rough in Collyhurst – the nuns used to rob us for rusks"; to the Royle Family and Shameless and beyond. To the act in question, I can hear in my mind's ear something like "Isn't that her from number 4? I wonder when she last had her nails done."

Where else would anyone be proud that Canal Street, centre of the gay village, lost its two capitals? But I would admit that violence in the city centre, and elsewhere, has increased over the last decade.

Not so long ago, I saw one of these machines with a Windows NT bsod.

Now with Windows11+AI

"Give me my money!"

"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."

"At a guess, it looks like a reboot happened, perhaps after a system update"

Or perhaps a good old-fashioned power-cut or glitch.

I woke up a couple of days ago to see my alarm clock flashing '00:00' which must have been a brief brownout as nothing else appeared to have rebooted.