I remember back around 1996 or so, my mom still went to the teller often, but soon after that I only remember ATM trips with her.
I’ve heard they’ve been around since the '70s but my guess as to when they became pretty commonplace would be the late 1980s? I do know that even as recently as ten years ago many of them did nothing but allow you to withdraw cash, while now you don’t really need the teller for anything aside from obtaining bank rolls of coins or sorting out issues with your bank. I can pop a physical check in at 3 in the morning and get cash for it.
They started appearing in quantity in big cities & suburbia around 1978. Many of the bigger banks led the way.
Even small town banks had them by 1981. At that time most could make a cash withdrawal or accept a deposit envelope containing checks. Which deposit would only post provisionally to your account until the bank retrieved it physically and processed it through their overnight batch system.
In the early days almost all ATMs were specific to one brand of bank, and were physically located in or near a bank branch.
The free-standing ones in grocery stores, convenience markets, etc., didn’t come in until the late 80s. That’s also about the time the interbank networks got going so you could stick your Citibank card into a BofA ATM and expect it to work. For a small extra fee.
My dad worked for IBM and I can remember him using their ATMs (The IBM Credit Union) in the late 70s. They only existed at the actual bank locations, there weren’t any small, free-standing ones. And they didn’t have any kind of electronic display, but rather they had a small window that had a mechanical series of rotating ‘plates’ inside with every possible instruction printed on one (after you entered a command you could see it scroll thru them before it stopped at the right one). You couldn’t deposit, only withdraw. And they also didn’t have bill counters, only prepacked envelopes of $25, $50 or $100 dollars that they dispensed.
I also remember that they were often out of service because criminals would keep taking sledgehammers to them thinking they could get to the money!
Originally every bank had their own ATMs and their own ATM cards (which were just ATM cards, not credit cards) and they would only work in their bank’s machines. I live in NY state so I remember when NYCE came around. It was one of the first interbank networks and now as long as your bank’s ATM card had the NYCE logo on it it would work in any ATM that did as well. Then ATM cards slowly got replaced with debit cards with VISA and MasterCard branding, which meant that (eventually) you could use them not only at any ATM but pretty much at any POS cash register.
My recollection is that they started becoming ubiquitous–and, as others have said, working between banks–in the late 80’s. (I remember seeing TV commercials for MAC, or Money Access Center, which is now part of the STAR network, around that time. My parents even referred to ATMs as “MAC machines.”) When I was a young kid in the early 80s, accompanying Mom around as she did errands nearly always included a trip to the drive-through bank teller to withdraw some cash.
Slightly before that. I left Denver in 1984, and I used them regularly by then. In fact, in a way, my ATM card in Denver worked better than the one I have now. I banked through a credit union at that time, which issued me an ATM card, although it had no machines of its own. All of the ATMs for essentially all the banks in the Denver metro area were on something called the “star system” at that time, though, and I could use my ATM card in any of them. And there wasn’t any kind of “foreign ATM” fee. I simply didn’t pay attention to which bank’s ATMs I used. I was very surprised when I went to CA, and found that the ONLY bank whose ATMs would take my card was BofA.
As a British data point, I can remember standing next to my father on the first occasion he ever used one, c. 1981-2. (This was, incidentally, on the same street in Glasgow that saw the recent bin lorry tragedy.)
This then prompted me to write a comic short story for an English class exercise that relied on the notion that, while the reader was assumed to know what an ATM was, it might plausibly be the main character’s first encounter with one.
Certainly by 1985, if not before, they had become a completely unremarkable feature of British life.
In Wisconsin, the TYME* ATM system was a cross-bank network which was fairly ubiquitous in that state by the early 1980s (and had many free-standing ATMs, as well as those at banks). It was, apparently, the first interbank ATM network in the U.S. As I remember it, you could get cash from your own bank account at any TYME Machine (yes, they made that pun intentionally).
(* TYME was an acronym for “Take Your Money Everywhere”.)
When I moved from Wisconsin to Chicago in 1989, I was surprised at how fragmented the Chicago-area ATM systems were – they were just starting to integrate ATM networks under the Cash Station brand name, but there were still a lot of banks which were only on their own networks, and if you banked at a smaller institution, you were often limited in which machines you could use. By the early 1990s, the Chicago area system became far more integrated.
I recall one as early as 1971. I am sure of this date because our bank had them, although they charged you $2 a year for a card (that saved them money because I didn’t have to use a teller) and I moved from that apartment in early 1972 and left that bank and opened an account at a bank that gave the card free. No, the cards weren’t credit cards, but they morphed into debit cards. What I cannot remember is whether you could use them only at the branch where you had an account. By 1980, the ATMs were available at every bank, for free, although I cannot remember when the ATM networks came about.
In 1991, I was in Europe and, although they also had ATMs, you could not use them with North American cards, or rather you could not count on it. I think there were some British banks that did allow that. What I did on that trip was send Visa a $5000 overpayment and make cash “advances” against that. No interest that way. The next time I went to Europe in 1997, all this friction was gone.
It used to be that when you traveled you had to think about carrying enough money or traveller’s checks. That is now all done with. Although you pay through the nose for any foreign currency transactions. Still, you don’t have to give it any thought.
In simultaneous and independent efforts, engineers in Japan, Sweden, and Britain developed their own cash machines during the early 1960s. The first of these that was put into use was by Barclays Bank in Enfield Town in north London, United Kingdom, on 27 June 1967. This machine was the first in the world and was used by English comedy actor Reg Varney. This instance of the invention is credited to John Shepherd-Barron of printing firm De La Rue, who was awarded an OBE in the 2005 New Year Honours.
I mention this to point out there is no rush to judgement in the British Honours System. The online version of the Swedish machine is listed to have been operational on 6 May 1968, while claiming to be the first online cash machine in the world (ahead of a similar claim by IBM and Lloyds Bank in 1971). The idea of a PIN stored on the card was developed by a British engineer working on the MD2 named James Goodfellow in 1965 (patent GB1197183 filed on 2 May 1966 with Anthony Davies). The essence of this system was that it enabled the verification of the customer with the debited account without human intervention. This patent is also the earliest instance of a complete “currency dispenser system” in the patent record. Wikipedia ATM
Still, In 1968 and 1969 German electrical engineers Helmut Gröttrup and Jürgen Dethloff jointly filed patents for the automated chip card (for details see page of Helmut Gröttrup) Wiki Smart Cards
Anyway although I was around before such becoming ubiquitous, I honestly can’t remember when they weren*'t* around, unlike cell-phones.
I grew up in the early 70s and me & my mom did this too. I always made sure the bank teller at the drive-up window saw me so she’d include a piece of candy in the drawer!
I know, they’re redundant acronyms.The abundance of high tech means they’ll just keep coming. And I do nearly always say only “ATM” and “PIN”…
And the one I had in 84 worked worse than the one I have now. Entirely bank based systems, and the quality of the service depended on the bank. “The State Bank of Victoria” had a computer system which went down periodically, taking the ATM system and all client POS withdrawals with it.
I’d go into a petrol (gas) station, fill up, then be unable to pay.
In the Dallas area, there were pioneering installations in 1977. By spring 1979, big banks were doing multiple installations in large cities. My Tulsa bank offered Burger Chef coupons if you let them show you how it worked. I let them do so several times.
NYCE tried to get FNCB (later Citibank) to join their network. Citibank declined, saying “why should we open our network to you, when we have more ATMs than all your member banks combined?”
At the time, the encoding on Citicards was infrared optical (there were rectangular blocks of IR-opaque material laminated on the inside of the of the card) without a magnetic stripe, so NYCE cards wouldn’t be interoperable anyway. Later Citicards included both mag stripe (for other ATMs) and optical (for the Citi CATs*) encoding. Eventually the cards became mag stripe only.
CAT = Citibank Automated Teller - these were their original ATMs, with the rotating drum cash dispenser.
In the UK in the early to mid 70s my father used a very simple ATM which only dispensed a fixed amount and retained the card each time. A replacement card was mailed to him the next day. Only a select few bank branches had one.
Shortly thereafter, still in the 70s but after 1976, something closer to modern ATMs appeared. Rather than have an electronic display the first ones had the instructions printed on a rubber belt which was scrolled back and forth to hopefully line up with the buttons along the side of the display area. There was no way for it to display your balance on-screen but you may have been able to request it printed one on a slip of paper. Problems with the rubber belt were a common mode of failure.
By the time I got my first bank account in 1982 more modern ATMs were installed in the majority of banks and services like on-screen balance checking were the norm.
Still the case with ATMs in Ireland. Whenever I express my frustration about this, Irish people get this really confused look on their face, like they can’t even fathom the idea of depositing at an ATM.
