The year was 1973.

• The Concorde supersonic transport (SST) makes its first Atlantic crossing
• First release of American prisoners of war (POW) from Vietnam
• The patent for the ATM is granted
  

Meanwhile . . .

Few inventions in modern times rival the revolutionary impact that ATMs have had on the world scene. What began as a tepid experiment in the 1960s proved to be lightning in a bottle by the end of the decade. And the glow still shines brightly today.

The first ATMs might have appeared a little ugly at first. Diebold’s prototype looked like something out of a Star Wars movie, a shrouded circular object mounted on a tripod. But in terms of what they could do, they were breathtaking.

Imagine for example, the glee of customers who no longer needed to wait from Saturday noon to Monday morning to access their cash from the bank.

And bankers loved ATMs, as well. Still do. They cut operational expenses, reduced long lines at the teller window and provide customers with much-appreciated services.

Today, ATMs are better looking, feature-rich and inextricably woven into the daily lives of hundreds of millions of people across the globe. And, while access to cash is still their predominant service, ATMs can now do so much more.

Some ATMs will sell lottery tickets, allow you to pay your utility bill, buy postage stamps, make deposits of cash or checks. . .

Smart financial institutions have transformed ATMs into machines that can become effective relationship devices. ATMs, for example, can be integrated with other delivery channels and personalized to target market to specific user audiences. Personalization functions allow customers to offer customized screens, language preferences, preferred cash withdrawal amounts, alert services (reminders about low balances, check reordering, etc.) and more.

ATMs have, in fact, become competitive differentiators in the marketplace.

It is all a far cry from the late 1960s when European inventors (the U.K., Austria and Scandinavia among them) took the first baby steps toward developing an ATM.

ATMs were the late 1960-early-1970 result of a Baby Boomer generation that was entering the computer age and placing a value on speed of delivery. The new lifestyle demanded convenience, such as the 24-hour supermarket, the all-day drug store, the round-the-clock service station. Why not 24-hour banking? But without a substantial increase in overhead, the bankers insisted.

So, the ATM provided essential services without the need for more brick-and-mortar facilities.

Evolution, revolution

Diebold studied the marketplace, saw the inherent needs of the industry and decided to wade in, following on the heels of the De La Rue company’s successes in Pennsylvania.

Compared to the functionality available to users today, Diebold’s first ATMs were hardly very awe-inspiring. Cash dispensing was their major job. They consisted of only a card reader, a keypad, a cash delivery point and a printer to issue a receipt. 

But bankers soon learned they didn’t just want simple cash dispensers. They wanted multi-functional units. Diebold seized the moment and became the first company to develop multi-functional ATMs, displaying its prototype at the American Bankers Association National Automation & Operations Conference in 1967.

By 1975, almost all U.S. financial institutions had installed an ATM. Citibank installed 500 ATMs by 1978, and the proliferation race was on. By the 1980s, banks considered ATMs indispensable to their financial service delivery strategies.

The first Diebold ATMs were offline-only machines (such as the TABS 500, of 1973). That means that they weren't connected to any "host" computer in the bank. They simply processed their activity on their own -- connected by means of a power cord. 

Around 1975, Diebold ATMs went online, connected through dedicated communications lines to the banks’ central systems. The data rate then was 300 bits/second, compared to 100 million bits/second on Ethernet lines today. It’s like comparing “duh” to “z-z-zoom.”
 
The advent of microprocessors around 1978 allowed a different approach to the central processing unit inside an ATM. The Diebold TABS 9000 family used a microprocessor. At the same time, along came a shift in how an ATM was controlled. And that produced a shift in the nature of the software’s functionality to permit flexible programming without having to change software.
 
In the early 1980s, personal computer technology began to change the norm for computing environments. Now available to the ATM were the increasingly rich features that were becoming available on PCs.

By the 1990s, the favored operating environment was Microsoft Windows®. It provided even more choices in functionality, richer screen graphics and more flexible communications options, including technology common to Internet communications.
 
At the turn of the century, communications connections were easy to come by and data bandwidths allowed for moving more data in very small amounts of time. Diebold’s core Agilis® architecture (marketed as Agilis Power and made available in 2002) was based on this emerging model. Applications could now be constructed out of software components and those components could assemble almost any type of application once the business objective was defined.   

Today, our company brings Agilis EmPower® to market. It allows customers to further customize and personalize their financial offerings through the ATM in very user-friendly ways. It’s being called revolutionary, just as the original ATMs were.
 
Diebold has taken the next step toward providing solutions for tomorrow.