History of Smart Card’s

1950 – 1975:

The first plastic-based card was issued by Diners club in 1950. By the end of fifties two other firms joined the technology, American Express and Carte Blanche. These early cards were only capable of storing names, numbers, and codes. The first cards with magnetic stripes were developed by the International Air Transportation Association (IATA). In 1970, Dr. Kunitaka Arimura of Japan filed the first and only patent on the smart card concept. The first smart card was developed in 1974 by a Frenchman named Roland Moreno. He developed a method of embedding an electronic memory in a plastic card. This was then loaded with currency onto the card to allow the user to spend it with merchants who had the necessary electronic payment equipment. These cards were also developed to unlock doors to government facilities. This was the precursor to one of today’s uses of smart cards. Due to the immaturity of the semiconductor technology at this time, most of the work on this project was at the research and development stage

1975 – 1990:

In 1977, Motorola and Bull Corporation created the first microprocessor card but early design flaws made these types of cards impractical. In 1985, the French government was undergoing a complete overhaul of its technology infrastructure and undertook a major involvement in smart card applications by issuing an order for 16 million cards. These were to be used for Frances banks as a Visa debt card. In 1986, the prompting of security and vandalism of its pay telephone across the nation, France Telecom ordered 7 million cards for its customers. Also in that year, 14,000 smart cards were issued to clients of the Bank of Virginia and the Maryland National Bank. During this same period, 50,000 Casio cards were distributed to clients of the First National Palm Beach Bank and the Mall bank to be used with the new Automated Teller Machines (ATM). These were the first wide spread use in the United States. Several other U.S cities conducted smart-card trials, but the cards failed to win consumer confidence. This was due to the fact that Americans had been using the magnetic-stripe cards and were not ready to transition to the new technology that smart cards afforded.

1990 – Present:

As the 1980’s ended, technological break throughs and increased reliability of the smart cards and practical applications of the card gained wider acceptance in the world especially Europe. In 1992, a nationwide prepaid card project (DANMONT) was started in Denmark. In 1994, the German government began issuing 80 million serial memory chip cards as citizen health cards. Also in this year, the French government initiated a field test of “multi-functional” smart cards. In 1995 Europay, MasterCard, and Visa published joint specifications for global microchip-based bankcards. In 1996 during the summer Olympics in Atlanta, GA 1.5 million VISA cash stored value smart cards were issued. During this same time period, MasterCard and Visa each began working on solving the problem of interoperability. Two different card solutions were developed; the JavaCard by Visa and the Multi-application Operating System (MULTOS) backed by MasterCard. In 1998 the U.S. Government’s General Service Administration (GSA) began reviewing the smart card concept and looking at practical solutions for the Federal Government. This led to the development of the Smart Card Technology Center in Washington, DC. In September of that year, Microsoft joined the smart card bandwagon and introduced, it’s new Windows smart card operating system. In 1999, GSA announced that it would start to field approximately 4.3 million Common Access Cards (CAC) to military personnel and DOD personnel starting in FY 2001.
 

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