Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992)dir Chris Columbus
That’s why credit cards have embossed digits on the front, is to make a carbon copy in an offline machine like that.
The embossed digits are being phased out, though. I just got a debit card without embossing.
(don’t worry; I was born the year after this movie came out, and I didn’t see one of these machines in use until I was like 25. at a Renaissance Faire. a stall that had lost power was using it as a backup for their Square reader)
I thought I would find out what it was when I grew up then I grew up and they didn’t exist
We had one of these at my job in case of power outages. I’m sure they have a fancy name like “imprinter” or something, but everyone I know just called it the Kerchunker.
The Card Verification Value, the 3 non-embossed numbers on the back, was introduced once online consumer purchasing using just the numbers and not the physical card handed to a clerk got big, such that the hundreds of carbon copies of your 12-digit number floating around the knees of every minimum-wage clerk in the city were no longer sufficient by themselves
