edgould1...@comcast.net (Ed Gould) writes: > I was not on the the team (next cubicle over). I was somewhat involved > in the precursor(?) of Mastercard called Town & Country. This was in > Chicago. The OS that Mastercard was was written was DOS (I *THINK* it > was on a 360/30) and to some extent MFT (350/50) (this goes back 40 or > so years so please forgive the memory errors). I do not have anything > to add to the mastercard/ and the VISA (I just do not remember what > the name was). I will take as face value about the battle, although I > do remember it somewhat.
mastercard had huge number of series/1 in their network interfacing between acquirers and issuers. around the turn of decade ... the populace was moving from credit to debit ... and the card associations introduced "signature debit" at point-of-sale ... that ran through the credit networks (and had credit level fraud and the much higher credit/fraud interchange fees ... rather than pin-debit through the debits network that had much lower fees as well as card associations not getting anything). national retailer association then had anti-trust legal action against the card associations for forcing debit point-of-sale transactions as "signature debit" (with significantly higher fees) ... and won huge settlement. card associations then came up with "cash back" as an alternative ... where the cash back interchange rate that merchants pay is significantly higher than the "cash back" that consumers actually see (this is eventually going to replace the enormous amounts they make off fraud surchange fees ... when the get around to deploying more secure technology) -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
