OMG!! I remember those! Very early eighties? I remember my first semi-regular usage of money machines was after I went to university and got a summer job. I had money coming in regularly for the first time (11.62 $/h on the line at GM was damn good money for a student in 1981). I opened an account at Canada Trust because they had the longest hours (and advertised this heavily), and they had this type of money machine.
Not long before this (late seventies?), the Canadian banks advertised their new and amazing “Multi-Branch Banking” service, where you could access your account from any branch of the bank nationwide. I suspect they’d just gotten their computer systems up to snuff to handle it internally during the seventies.
Americans, keep in mind that Canadian banks were never limited by the kind of rules that prohibited US banks from having networks of branches nationwide. There are less than a dozen big banks in Canada, plus a number of smaller and niche competitors, plus a network of credit unions.
So when one of the big banks said that you could get to your money from any branch, your money was suddenly available nationwide. You could count on finding a branch of your bank in any medium-to-big city and most smaller towns.
Nowadays, of course, we have one standardised inter-bank debit-card and money-machine network: you can use your Canadian debit card at any Canadian money-machine, and at most retailers, even general stores in obscure places.
My mom worked in a bank as one of her first jobs after leaving high-school, and the was one of the first people to see a “computer” in Peterborough, Ontario. This was in the very early 1950s. She told me that they didn’t call it a computer; it was just the “Marchant machine”; Marchant must have been the maker’s name.
There’re a lot of those around here even now…
They installed those and then had to uninstall them?
Hmmm… this brings up another memory.
I remember the very first time they did the temperature in Celsius on the radio weather reports. It was around 1973. It sure sounded odd, but we kids got used to it quickly.
I also remeber the Labour Day weekend they changed all the roadsigns to metric. They basically just put big stickers with new numbers over the old numbers. Occaisionally on the backroads you’ll see a sign with a sticker even today.
On the distance-to-destination signs (“Toronto 164”) they added little reminder tabs with the symbol “km” to the signs; these were located above the numbers and projected upwards above the top edge of the sign.
For older cars with non-metric instruments you could get little stickers with km/h numbers, to put on the glass of the speedometer…
It was much later that I learned to drive, so for me it’s been litres and kilometres my whole driving life.
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