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The death of the magnetic stripe credit card

First, we said goodbye to the floppy disk drive . Then, the Sony Walkman was unceremoniously buried . 

Now, it’s time to prepare a eulogy to a gadget that's been an even bigger part of the American landscape for a much longer time -- the magnetic stripe credit card.

An ingenious technology in its time, the magnetic stripe was invented in the 1960s by marrying tape-recorder-like magnetic tape to a credit card. Magnetic tape itself was a remarkable invention, with its roots in the 1920s, when it was first used by musicians to record audio.  In the 1950s, computer scientists began using it to record data, setting the stage for the “mag stripe card.”

In the 1960s, credit card fraud was skyrocketing, and clerks were stuck manually comparing account numbers embossed on cards with printed lists of accounts linked to fraud. The addition of the magnetic stripe allowed cashiers to automate this process -- one swipe and the number could be recognized by a computer. More importantly, the account number could be transmitted over a phone line to a centralized list of fraudulent accounts.  The magnetic stripe had fraudsters on the run for quite a while.

But as the gadget is approaching its 50th anniversary, it's looking a little old -- as outdated, perhaps, as the IBM Selectric typewriter, which was introduced about the same time. Criminals long ago figured out how to circumvent the mag stripe’s fraud-fighting features --  really, by the mid-1980s, when IBM killed the Selectric in favor of the Wheel Writer. And now, European banks seem to have positively murderous intentions for the old faithful mag stripe.

In 2005, Eurozone banks converted their cards to the "chip and PIN" system, in which a more secure microchip embedded in the card performs most of the security functions.  Because U.S. banks are still using the old system, most European banks and merchants still have to accept the old-fashioned cards and the fraud that comes with them -- and they are sick of it.

The European Payments Council recently passed a resolution (PDF) mandating that use of "use of magnetic stripe fallback (be restricted) to exceptional cases" and allowing banks to "to refuse magnetic stripe transactions if they so wish."

As a recent banking blog put it, the European council wants to "kill the old magnetic stripe .

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