I have a personal PIN I use with my card! 
The first ATMs I recall were in the mid-1970s in Cambridge MA. Cambridge Bank and Trust had “Cool Cash” machines (nobody called them ATMs yet). AFAIK, they only had three machines in Kendall Square and two at Fresh Pond. They were popular on Saturday mornings, when the bank wasn’t open,. and lines would develop there, so that the machines usually ran out of cash before the day was out. It only dispensed cash in two amounts, like $20 and $40. I don’t rtecall any other ATMs at that time, even in Boston itself.
The next time I recall seeing ATMs was when I moved to Salt Lake City about ten years later. One of the banks had ATMs, but they only had three of them, and only one was in downtown SLC. The others were miles away, and nobody else had ATMs there at the time.
But when I returned to Boston a few years later, in the late 1980s, ATMs were ubiquitous, and several large banks had them all over Boston and the surrounding towns.
I was part of the team that rolled out the ATM network in California for Bank of America. This was around 1982-4, and BofA (then limited to one-state operations like all banks) was a little behind the other majors in providing ATMs. So I’d peg the first wave of reasonably widespread and common ATM service in California at 1980-82, complete (pretty much every bank and a few standalone sites) by 1985.
Let’s be precise here - it’s a personal PIN number.
(I once knew a woman who consistently referred to it this way. She once - just once, but I treasure it - made reference to her “personal PIN ID number”.)
Some acronyms just leave comprehension hanging. “Enter your PIN” is absolutely correct, in the sense that it reads out as a complete instruction… but there’s something hard-bitten about it that “Enter your PIN number” smooths out.
Ditto for “Submit applications in PDF” - it’s redundant to make it “…PDF format,” but it adds clarity. (It’s nearly always “Submit forms in DOC format,” for example.)
No one claims that either English or techspeak is logical. Sometimes it’s better if it’s illogicallized a bit.
This thread made me start wondering why my mother has always referred to ATMs as Teller24’s - even now, that’s the language she’ll use. Some googling led me here, where I learned:
So they were known as Teller24s in Chattanooga before I was born, more than 40 years now. If my mother’s been calling them that this long, I’m not likely to get her to change. 
I started using bank ATMs when I moved to Maryland in 1979 (single network); my experience was very much like LSLGuy’s #2 post. By mid-80s I had my first multinetwork-enabled ATM cards (MAC/Cirrus). Not until the 90s did I begin to be able to make purchases with ATM-debit and not until the 00’s with Visa/MC-branded debit cards.
Interestingly, since around 2010 the prevalence of direct deposit for just about any significant payment made it pretty rare to make ATM deposits, and that has rendered me a bit baffled as to how to perform a deposit on newfangled-technology ATMs with a deposit slot, since they no longer seem to provide envelopes or slips (used to be, fillout the envelope, put in your check or cash, add one of your slips AND/OR the machine would spit out a slip to put in the envelope, then seal the envelope, then feed it in). My brain just seems to resist that you can now simply shove a naked check straight into the intake slot…
It depends on what you mean by ‘widespread’. I graduated high school in a very small Louisiana town in 1991 and never used one before that. I think I saw a few in the closest big cities like Dallas, TX but I didn’t personally know anyone that had an ATM card. We had small town bank tellers and work to cash checks for us so the demand wasn’t there for most people. I got my first ATM card in New Orleans in 1991 and have used them ever since.
However, I went back to my hometown for the first time in a very long time in 2005. I asked someone where the nearest ATM was. They had no idea what I was talking about until I described it and they claimed they had seen one somewhere but couldn’t remember where. Repeat that for several more people. ATM’s were still a foreign concept there.
Finally, a woman, an actual bank teller, told me that her bank didn’t have one installed yet but she heard a new bank a few miles away had just installed one a few months before. Nobody used it of course but it was there. I drove there and it was indeed just sitting in the lobby as pristine as the day it was installed. A few people watched me as I put my card in and got money out of this new-fangled device. It was a definite Back to the Future moment.
I told my then stepmother that story and expected a chuckle because she lived in a much bigger town and is wealthy and well-educated. Nope, she had never used an ATM by 2005 either. My project for the day was for use to go to lunch and then the bank to get her an ATM card and teach her how to use one. Several lessons later, she a thrilled owner of a brand new card that could get her money almost anywhere (even outside of banking hours!). She was absolutely thrilled and very proud because none of her friends had such a thing. Again, this is 10 years ago, not 1985.
Still today I can only make a deposit at one of my bank’s branded ATMs, and I think this is pretty universal. I doubt it’s a technical limitation, bank’s have probably found that customers aren’t willing to pay a fee to give them their money (which non-home-bank ATMs would inevitably charge, just like for withdrawals!) Although now I can deposit checks by taking a photo of them with my bank’s smartphone app!
Well, they can’t use that excuse here - Irish banks don’t charge for withdrawing from another bank’s ATM. (Surprisingly, since they charge us for everything else.) I’d be happy enough if I could only deposit into my own bank’s ATM, it’s just annoying that I have to go to the bank during working hours to deposit.
I think the next logical question is to ask when ATMs will disappear. I’ve noticed that I virtually never need or use physical cash any more, nor do I need the ATM to deposit checks. At this point, there seems to be only 2 reasons for cash :
- Currently, the credit card companies are screwing merchants out of about 3-5% of each transaction. The merchants do not have the option to decline the fees cuz it’s an oligopoly and they need the business. So, the merchants are working out a way to eliminate these fees.
- If you want to do a transaction that doesn’t show up on the records (pay a hooker, buy some drugs, pay someone to work for you unofficially) you need cash. It’s also the only practical way to steal money as far as I know : if someone fraudulently transfers money from one account to another, sooner or later the missing funds will be discovered, and then the transaction can be reversed. I suppose the government would very much like cash to disappear for these reasons.
Here’s picture of the multi-talented Reg Varney using the first ever ATM in Enfield (London);
he could drive a bus and use an ATM (though not at the same time).
Couldn’t act, mind you.
I think it was around 1988 when ATMs (or as we call them, “Bank Machines”) starting being installed in my city. You could withdraw $5 from the Royal Bank (now RBC) ones.
People were scamming what was then The Toronto Dominion Bank “Green Machine” by depositing empty envelopes and withdrawing money. I don’t know why because they’d always get caught.
I remember this one at Columbia Bank & Trust in Maryland, late 1970s–Harvey Wallbanker.
To me, it’s perfectly logical, and that people get annoyed at expressions like “PIN number” annoys me. When you say something like “ATM machine” or “PIN number,” your brain doesn’t parse the acronym out into its constituent parts. It treats it as its own syntactic unit–it doesn’t matter what it literally stands for. Adding “machine” is for clarity. Same with “number,” especially since the word “pin” has other meanings in English. There’s nothing wrong with redundancy in language, especially within an acronym or initialism. And how many people even know the “f” in PDF stands for format?
Jives with my experience. I was a B of A customer in California, and got my first ATM card in 1981.
ATMs were rather common when I started college in 1982. If you could find a branch of YOUR bank, they would probably have an ATM there. I distinctly remember it being a big deal when they trotted out the idea that you didn’t have to use their specific ATM but you could use any ATM which was part of some network whose logo was on the back of your card, assuming you could find one that had that same logo (but there was a $1 fee for using the network). That was 1983 by my memory. In 1985 I remember visiting another college campus and seeing 4 ATMs from various banks in front of the Student Union building. It was years later that I started seeing them in grocery stores and then gas stations.
Around 1994 I remember seeing a commercial on TV where a couple of white American tourists are visiting some third-world country and they have some minor problem like a flat tire on a bicycle or something and this ten-year-old native boy runs up and says “Ehtiem fix everything!” and leads them through the streets while the couple whisper to each other “Who is this Ehtiem? Maybe he’s a bicycle mechanic?” and finally the little boy proudly shows them their destination, an ATM mounted in a wall.
In New York City, most major banks I knew of had ATMs by 1983 or 1984.
When I moved to Austin, TX in 1986, they were everywhere.
Early 80s for sure in California. They were all over the place when I was a college freshman in 1982 but still novel enough that many of my fellow freshman used one for the first time that year.
When I went to college in 1977, ATMs were just becoming available. My bank at college had one, where I could get a pre-filled envelope of 25 or 50 dollars as others have noted.
It was a big deal, in 1980, when I realized another bank would let me get any amount I wanted in 5 dollar increments if I had an account with them.
ATM networks were new in the early 1980s - PLUS or Cirrus were the two big ones. I have a vague memory of having to call a number, or get a printout, in order to find out where the nearest bank was that was on the same network as mine - kind of a big deal when we went on a cross-country driving trip in 1985.
By the time I moved to the DC area in the late 1980s, it was becoming a non-issue; pretty much every bank was on both of those two networks.
Nowadays I don’t even look for PLUS or Cirrus - I can get money out anywhere. I do still try to look for credit union ATMs since many / most of them (around here at least) don’t charge a transaction fee if you get cash from another CU’s account.